Criminalized communities

The dominant ‘criminal tribe’ stereotype that was cemented in the late 1860s was premised on hereditary criminality, understood not in terms of biology, but rather through the colonial understanding of caste as a rigid and unchanging hierarchy. From ‘time immemorial’, certain castes had apparently had criminal hereditary occupations and were thus ‘destined by the usage of caste to commit crime’.Footnote ¹⁶ The British also frequently equated the ‘criminal tribes’ with ‘wandering tribes’, thereby criminalizing peripatetic peoples.Footnote ¹⁷ The criminal tribe concept was shaped by British metropolitan anxieties about gypsies and Victorian ideas of habitual criminality,Footnote ¹⁸ as well as the long Indian literary tradition that depicted ‘robber castes’—low-caste groups that acquired criminal skills through hereditarily transmitted knowledge.Footnote ¹⁹

Experiments with policing the ‘criminal tribes’ predated the CTA in the NWP and also neighbouring Punjab.Footnote ²⁰ In 1863, the NWP relocated around 1,200 Bawariyas to a ‘colony’ at Bidauli in Muzaffarnagar district. They were given tenancies by the local landlord, Mehndi Hassan Khan, but by 1870 only 704 remained at Bidauli.Footnote ²¹ After 1871, to proclaim a ‘tribe, gang or class of persons’ as a ‘criminal tribe’ under the CTA, the NWP needed to prove to the Government of India that the group was ‘addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences’, largely through ethnographic and anecdotal evidence. However, the NWP also had to specify how the group would ‘earn its living’ following notification.Footnote ²² Since the NWP was unwilling to set up new ‘reformatory settlements’ or provide work and land, it was difficult to demonstrate that nomadic or landless people would be able to take up ‘honest’ livelihoods if notified.Footnote ²³ As such, in the 1870s the central government only approved the notification of four groups in the NWP: the Bawariyas of Muzaffarnagar district, the Aheriyas and Haburas of Etah district, and the ‘Sunorias’ (Sanorhiyas) of Lalitpur district. Bawariya, Aheriya, Habura, and Sanorhiya became official categories with nebulous boundaries and somewhat ambiguous meaning. As Bajrange, Gandee, and Gould have highlighted, ‘[c]ommunity descriptors, although not colonial “inventions,” often obscured fluid, nuanced and inconvenient realities which rendered them clumsy bureaucratic devices’.Footnote ²⁴

The Sanorhiyas were described as a criminal ‘fraternity’ that comprised people of various jatis (birth groups or castes) of high, middling, and low status, who were employed by the small princely state of Tehri or Orchha in Bundelkhand.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, unlike most groups designated as ‘criminal tribes’, the Sanorhiyas were not a jati and they were not necessarily low status. Moreover, NWP officials did not consider Sanorhiyas criminals by caste occupation, in contrast to the ‘criminal tribe’ stereotype.Footnote ²⁶ Colonial officials usually used the term ‘Sanorhiya’ (a Brahman community) to describe these gangs, but they occasionally termed them ‘Oootageyrah’ (uthaigira, a thief, pickpocket, or rascal).Footnote ²⁷ The gangs were possibly known as uthaigiras, but NWP administrators’ insistent questioning of informants on the question of caste produced the answer of ‘Sanorhiya’, a high-status identity.Footnote ²⁸ Though they lived in British territory, the gangs were part of Orchha's security apparatus. Within a ruler's domain, there were ‘chains of patronage’ running from rulers, to nobility, to landholders and, as Piliavsky has shown, each segment of this chain employed ‘raider-protector’ groups, which ‘protected those who patronized them and plundered those who did not’.Footnote ²⁹ Raids allowed patrons to raise funds, to intimidate rivals, and to restore perceived rights. In the case of Sanorhiyas, they apparently shoplifted and robbed at some distance from Orchha, thus undermining rival political powers. The gangs reportedly gifted valuable booty to the Orchha court and paid a tax, thus providing access to high-value stolen items and additional revenue.Footnote ³⁰ Meanwhile, the gang leaders or sarganas had policing functions within the Orchha domain. Membership of the gangs fluctuated, as men used an occasional thieving expedition to supplement their incomes.Footnote ³¹ Thus, many sometime-gang members and people who had not been on plundering expeditions were likely to have been caught up in the CTA.

Nineteenth-century colonial sources describe Bawariyas, Aheriyas, and Haburas as ‘Untouchable’ and today, several Indian states classify them as ‘Scheduled Castes’ (SCs).Footnote ³² However, unpacking these groups’ historical identities, occupations, and social practices is a complex task. Criminalizing language pervades the accounts of British administrators, Indian police, and ‘respectable’ informants. These commentators frequently equated certain sources of livelihood—for instance, hunting and forest gathering—and certain ways of life—especially, seasonal migration—with criminality. Moreover, both elite Indian and British commentators described Bawariyas, Aheriyas, and Haburas in terms of ‘occupational stereotypes’ that emphasized ritually polluting caste occupations but obscured more diverse forms of labour.Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, colonial records hint at the varied work and mobility patterns of these communities.

The NWP government portrayed both the Bawariyas and Aheriyas as largely sedentary hunter-gatherers who used land and natural resources in unproductive ways. Colonial officials reported that Bawariyas hunted various animals (such as antelope, birds, lizards, and hares) for subsistence, for sale, and in the employment of European sportsmen.Footnote ³⁴ Bawariyas also gathered forest produce and reportedly practised ‘peculiar’ forms of agriculture, such as the scattering of timber ashes along with grains at sowing time.Footnote ³⁵ Yet some colonial officials described Bawariyas as ‘fairly respectable cultivators’.Footnote ³⁶ Bawariya men were also employed as chaukidars (watchmen), while Bawariya women often sold gathered medicinal roots and plants, and made patchwork quilts.Footnote ³⁷ Many Bawariyas probably combined cultivation (of various sorts) with agricultural labour, shikar (hunting), gathering, and other work, depending on their economic needs. Such a mix of economic activities was fairly typical in rural areas.Footnote ³⁸ Similarly, colonial officials commonly depicted Aheriyas as a ‘hunting tribe’—indeed, Aheriya comes from aheri, meaning a hunter or fowler.Footnote ³⁹ Aheriyas also gathered forest produce and sold leaf platters, baskets, and other consumer goods made from gathered materials.Footnote ⁴⁰ Many were tenant cultivators, including the residents of nine of the 12 Aheriya villages that were registered under the CTA in Etah.Footnote ⁴¹ Hence, Aheriyas had varied forms of livelihood in addition to, or apart from, shikar.

Given the well-documented British valorization of hunting,Footnote ⁴² it might appear surprising that the NWP government classified several groups that were associated with hunting as ‘criminal tribes’. However, colonial commentators made a sharp distinction between hunting for leisure, which was manly and sporting, and hunting for subsistence, which they blamed for the destruction of game stocksFootnote ⁴³ and disparaged as ‘dirty’ and ‘primitive’.Footnote ⁴⁴ British commentators also criticized the dietary habits of subsistence hunting groups as ‘unclean’ and ‘filthy’, imbibing upper-caste Hindu attitudes.Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition, ‘hunting tribes’ were criminalized because of the importance of agrarianization to colonial economic and environmental policies.Footnote ⁴⁶ The colonial state sought to encourage taxable and high-yield forms of cultivation and discourage supposedly ‘lazy’ and ‘unproductive’ farming, like shifting cultivation.Footnote ⁴⁷ It also attempted to incorporate ‘forest dwellers into a political ecology based on taxation and intensive resource exploitation’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Groups that were associated with hunting, gathering, and marginal forms of cultivation challenged the colonial agrarian order.

Meanwhile, colonial officials defined the Haburas of the central Ganges-Yamuna Doab as a ‘vagrant thieving tribe’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The colonial association of nomadic groups with criminality was most explicit in relation to the Haburas in this region and period. Uncontrolled mobility prompted fears of porous political boundaries, illicit commerce, and unknowable populations. Peripatetic people also challenged the colonial state's efforts to make subjects legible, governable, and taxable.Footnote ⁵⁰ Colonial officials reported that vagrant Haburas gained ‘small sums of money’ by ‘fortune-telling’ for ‘the village people’.Footnote ⁵¹ They also hunted lizards, foxes, jackals, and other animals.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, many Haburas—including several of the people registered in Etah—were tenant cultivators, while the registered Haburas were primarily sedentary.Footnote ⁵³ Nevertheless, the association of Haburas with ‘vagrancy’ stuck.

According to NWP officials, Bawariya, Aheriya, and Habura men all pilfered crops and livestock, while the Bawariyas and Aheriyas also practised highway robbery and, additionally, the Haburas carried out burglary. Reportedly, all three groups committed crime in distant places and were engaged in relationships of patronage and indebtedness with local landlords, in which the patron's protection was exchanged for a cut of the booty.Footnote ⁵⁴ These patronage ties may have taken the form of ‘plunder-policing’. Indeed, Bawariyas were often employed as chaukidars and such watchmen were frequently ‘robber-police’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet some British officials doubted that Bawariyas, Aheriyas, and Haburas were more likely to commit crime than other social groups.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, prior to 1871 these communities were frequently the targets of police harassment and were always among the first suspects when crimes were reported.Footnote ⁵⁷

Regardless of the extent to which they actually committed crime, the diverse groups that were registered in this early period—the Sanorhiyas, Bawariyas, Aheriyas, and Haburas—reveal that multiple concerns intersected in the CTA, including: the challenge to colonial authority posed by raider-protector groups, contests over land and forest use, and fears of uncontrolled mobility. While Piliavsky has recently argued that the criminal tribe project was not about controlling peripatetic groups, as most historians have suggested, but rather about ‘uprooting … the indigenous policing system’, the mix of groups proclaimed in the NWP instead highlights that several preoccupations overlapped in the CTA.Footnote ⁵⁸

This confluence of various concerns is especially apparent when we consider the second part of the law. Historians of the ‘criminal tribes’ have failed to explain why the Hijra community was policed under Part II of the 1871 CTA, usually relegating Part II to footnotes, if they mention it at all.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hijras are a discipleship-based community that has traditionally performed and asked for donations (badhai), especially at births and marriages. Nineteenth-century sources describe Hijras as feminine-identified castrates or ‘Hijras from birth’. The colonial government labelled Hijras ‘eunuchs’ and accused them of being ‘professional sodomites’, ‘obscene’ performers, castrators, and kidnappers. The aims of Part I and Part II of the CTA were distinct and could be summed up as assimilation versus elimination. Part I aimed to compel ‘productive’ livelihoods by policing mobility and thus achieve the assimilation of the ‘criminal tribes’ into the lower rungs of rural society. In contrast, Part II aimed, in the short term, to erase Hijras from public space through the prohibition of performance and feminine dress, and, in the long term, to gradually render them ‘extinct’ by interfering with Hijra discipleship and preventing castration (which the British incorrectly considered a prerequisite for Hijra-hood).Footnote ⁶⁰ The colonial government usually viewed Hijras and the ‘criminal tribes’ as discrete criminal collectives. Nevertheless, both groups were understood through criminalizing discourses that were overlain with issues of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and domesticity. For British officials, deviant femininity and masculinity were aspects of the many-sided ‘criminal tribe problem’, along with anxieties about mobility, raider-protectors, and resource use.

Female sexual ‘immorality’ and the criminal tribe stereotype

Colonial commentators paid close attention to the minutiae of ‘criminal tribe’ conjugal and sexual practices, including marriage and divorce customs, domestic arrangements, and female sexual ‘immorality’.Footnote ⁶¹ This discourse linking criminality and deviant intimate lives was evident from the 1860s in government correspondence—in particular, district administrators’ ethnographic reports on local ‘criminal’ communities—and from the 1870s, in the published ethnographies of administrator-scholars, especially the regional glossaries of castes and tribes. However, because the NWP did not seek to regulate ‘criminal tribe’ marriage and sexual practices in the 1870s and 1880s, discussion of sexuality was less apparent in correspondence on the routine administration of the CTA than in ethnographic accounts. Published ethnographies tended to give a more abstract and homogenous view of indigenous communities, but these tomes were shaped by the relatively ‘satisficing’ ethnography of district officials. Ethnographic information emerged out of interactions with Indian colonial officials and Indian informants, especially ‘respectable natives’, including urban raises (patrons like banking and business magnates), rural landlords, and educated men from the emerging middle class.Footnote ⁶² The lengthy gendered and sexual commentary on the ‘criminal tribes’ reflected colonial ethnographers’ broader assumption that marriage and kinship practices were central to understanding caste. Colonial ethnographers and linguists also detailed ‘obscene’ and ‘immoral’ social practices in the hope of eventually stamping them out.Footnote ⁶³ Yet the colonial ethnography of the ‘criminal tribes’ also highlights the importance of gender and sexuality in historical processes of criminalization.

British officials repeatedly criticized ‘criminal tribe’ marriages as low-caste practices that did not involve rituals performed by Brahmans. A. O. Hume wrote of the Haburas: ‘Marriage seems scarcely to be with them a religious ceremony; it consists in placing four small coins in a figure of diamond shape outside which a circle is drawn, and round this the bride and bridegroom walk seven times.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Colonial commentators also claimed that the marriage customs of criminalized groups indicated their criminality. In the Aheriya community, which contextually practised dowry or bride price, prospective brides were apparently ‘stolen’ or ‘seduced’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This resonated with the wider colonial narrative that ‘wandering’ communities kidnapped children and trafficked slaves.Footnote ⁶⁶ In particular, British officials portrayed bride price as slavery. G. G. Parker, a police official, reported that Haburas’ ‘form of marriage is a sale, in which the man buys his wife from her father, for the invariable price of Rs. 25’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Not only were ‘criminal tribe’ conjugal practices criminal, but female sexual deviance was the counterpart to male criminality according to British administrators. In 1864, E. Tyrwhitt, a police official, claimed that lambardars (village headmen) often carried on ‘intrigue[s] with the [Bawariya] women’, intrigue being a common British euphemism for adultery.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1872, G. Palmer, Muzaffarnagar's magistrate, claimed that ‘by force of circumstances, generation [of Bawariyas] succeeded generation in which the men were professional thieves, and the women openly immoral’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Examples of this discourse abound in William Crooke's 1896 Tribes and castes volume, which synthesized much of the NWP correspondence on the criminal tribes from the previous three decades. For instance, ‘in Muzaffarnagar it is extremely rare for a Bâwariya woman to live with her husband. Almost invariably she lives with another man …’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, although Haburas strictly punished ‘inter-tribal immorality’, Crooke alleged that ‘the girls have considerable liberty before marriage, and a faux pas is not very seriously dealt with’.Footnote ⁷¹

Colonial officials contrasted different ‘criminal’ caste communities, as well as different ‘branches’ of castes, on the basis of women's perceived degree of sexual morality.Footnote ⁷² Crooke distinguished the relatively respectable ‘Eastern branch’ of Bawariyas who kept ‘their women … under careful control’, from the ‘disreputable’ ‘Western branch’ who lived in the Ganges-Yamuna Doab and among whom ‘the standard of morality is very low’.Footnote ⁷³ Moreover, colonial accounts frequently interlinked peripatetic lifestyles and sexual deviance. Crooke wrote of the ‘vagrant’ Haburas, ‘[t]heir women from their vagrant, mendicant life naturally bear an indifferent character’, whereas ‘settled’ Haburas enforced rules against ‘immorality’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similarly, police official R. T. Hobart labelled women of the Sansi community—a largely nomadic group that was proclaimed as a criminal tribe in the early 1890s—as ‘prostitutes’.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is difficult to determine the actual conjugal and sexual norms of these communities, given this highly sexualized ethnography.

Sexuality and conjugality were typically an explicit part of the NWP's case for notifying a group as a criminal tribe. In outlining the ‘customs’ of communities, administrators noted marriage and sexual practices—along with diet, religion, and (licit and illicit) occupations—to ‘prove’ two factors necessary for notification: first, that a community was a ‘distinct tribe’ and, second, that its members were ‘criminal as a whole’.Footnote ⁷⁶ If a group's ‘peculiarities in customs’ and distinctiveness from other low-status communities were in doubt, sexual and marriage practices became especially crucial. For instance, in an 1877 report, Parker emphasized that in establishing the distinctiveness of ‘Baherias’ (Beriyas or Bedias), ‘[t]he chief thing noticeable is their marriage custom’. He also repeatedly highlighted ‘the number of Baheria women in the keeping of zamindars’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this period, the Government of India accepted the criminality of most communities that the NWP proposed to notify, but, as we saw above, the central government's perception of a group's access to work or land cinched the case for notification.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nonetheless, sexual and marriage customs helped to prove that a community was ‘distinct’ and ‘criminal’.

In British India, gender and sexuality were often central to the discourses and practices through which socially marginalized peoples were criminalized. For instance, in the 1860s colonial administrators claimed that female prostitutes purchased kidnapped girls to be brothel workers and, moreover, that their criminality was evidenced by the ‘fact’ of their sexual embodiment: Indian prostitutes were invariably ‘infertile’, therefore all children in brothels must be kidnapped.Footnote ⁷⁹ The colonial stereotype of the Hijra kidnapper brought together ‘wandering’ criminality (even though Hijras were largely sedentary), deviant domesticity (the Hijra household was supposedly a brothel), sexual contagion (Hijras were ‘addicted’ to sex with men), and child sexual abuse (they were apparently the pimps of kidnapped Indian boys).Footnote ⁸⁰ In other settings, historians have also noted that processes of social and legal criminalization frequently involve gender and sexual discourses, though in contingent, context-specific ways.Footnote ⁸¹

Female sexuality was also wrapped up with late nineteenth-century middle-class Indian representations of crime. Newspaper reports often linked perceived spikes in crime to an increase in women's sexual immorality. This painted a picture of moral chaos and corruption, usually in distant or rival cities,Footnote ⁸² in a sexualized form of ‘inter-regional one-upmanship’.Footnote ⁸³ For instance, Lucknow's Oudh Akbar reported in 1872 that ‘the behavior of the women of Umritsur [Amritsar] continues to be indecent as ever’, while ‘[c]omplaints of theft and swindling are also said to be frequent in the city’.Footnote ⁸⁴

However, sexualized descriptions of ‘criminal tribe’ women did not appear in the North Indian press in the 1860s and 1870s. Though Indian commentators called for government action against several groups that the British labelled ‘criminal tribes’, such as the Bawariyas and Haburas, they did not dwell on the women of these communities.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nevertheless, the colonial narrative of the sexually wayward criminal tribeswoman drew upon middle-class Indian—and especially high-caste Hindu—representations of Dalit and Shudra women as hypersexual. (Recall that most ‘criminal tribes’ were socially marginalized and many were reportedly ‘Untouchable’, including Bawariyas, Aheriyas, and Haburas.) In the late 1800s, educated men from high-caste and ashraf (high-status) scribal communities increasingly identified as ‘middle class’ in order to distinguish themselves from the ‘old elite’, especially Indian rulers.Footnote ⁸⁶ Charu Gupta argues that didactic literature aimed at upper-caste, middle-class Hindu women constructed the ideal woman through representations of low-caste women as ‘other’. Softly spoken, even-tempered upper-caste women were contrasted with loud, foul-mouthed, and obscene low-caste women. Shudra and Dalit women were also represented as sexually available kutnis (vamps or pimps) who corrupted dominant-caste women. Dalit women were particularly prone to sexualization because they usually worked outside the home in mixed-gender situations, whereas femininity and public labour were increasingly seen as incompatible.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is notable that the British did not represent mixed-caste Sanorhiya gangs as failing to regulate women's sexuality. Colonial officials only described low-caste ‘criminal tribeswomen’ as sexually immoral, highlighting the imprints on colonial knowledge of high-caste, middle-class Hindu attitudes.

These discourses had a longer history—ancient Sanskrit texts portrayed low-caste women as polluted, evil, and lustful—but they took on a new salience in the late 1800s.Footnote ⁸⁸ Everyday caste-based practices surrounding conjugality and the management of women's sexuality became central to middle-class Hindu identity and were transformed and hardened in the process.Footnote ⁸⁹ The gendered construction of caste and class identity was propelled by middle-class men's anxieties about threats to their social status due to competition for employment, limited business successes, perceived threats to landowning, and nascent low-caste movements.Footnote ⁹⁰ Tanika Sarkar has argued that in the context of colonial rule, middle-class men made claims to social and political power in the only available domain—their own homes—placing enormous significance on conjugality and women's behaviour. Dominant-caste Hindu men sometimes ‘renovate[d]’ tradition ‘to accommodate spaces for dangerously dissident lower orders’.Footnote ⁹¹ But support for state intervention into ‘criminal’, ‘immoral’, or low-status homes allowed middle-class men to assert that their own homes were morally impeccable.Footnote ⁹² Portraying low-caste communities’ marriage and sexual practices as contemptible reinforced social hierarchies and constructions of class and caste identity. These wider political currents shaped the information ‘respectable’ informants provided to the British on the immoral sexuality of the ‘criminal tribes’.

For instance, colonial administrator-scholars’ critiques of ‘criminal tribe’ marriage customs resonated with middle-class, dominant-caste Hindu redefinitions of respectable conjugality. In the late 1800s, older ideas about ideal marriage forms narrowed and rigidified. Marriage ‘without price’ gained new significance as a marker of status, while bride price was condemned as ‘dishonourable’.Footnote ⁹³ Middle-class Indian commentators termed bride price a ‘kind of illegal union’, which was merely the ‘slave-trade in a disguised shape’.Footnote ⁹⁴ This indigenous politics surrounding marriage influenced colonial officials’ denunciation of bride-price and other ‘criminal tribe’ conjugal practices. The late nineteenth-century trope of the sexually immoral criminal tribeswoman was thus a product of convergence between colonial moralizing discourses and upper-caste, middle-class Hindu gender and caste politics.

The ‘problem’ of criminal tribe masculinity

For both middle-class Indians and British administrators, the criminal tribe ‘problem’ was also a problem of masculinity. In the late 1860s and 1870s, communities that the British considered ‘criminal tribes’ (such as Bawariyas and Haburas) were represented by the Urdu and Hindi press as badmash (people ‘of bad livelihood’) and, to a lesser extent, as robbers, dakaits (bandits), ‘tribes of professional criminals’, and ‘criminal tribes’.Footnote ⁹⁵Badmash was a ‘generic term’ for rascals and criminals, whether low-status or ‘debauched’ respectable people, which evoked the ‘dangerousness’ of illegitimately held power ‘that threaten[ed] person, property, and respectability’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The badmash was also a figure of aberrant masculinity. The North Indian press frequently represented badmashes, as well as dakaits and robbers, as indulging in drinking, gambling, and dancing.Footnote ⁹⁷ As Radhika Singha has pointed out, the badmash ‘is vested with a threatening masculinity, one distanced from “proper” work and associated with inappropriate forms of consumption’.Footnote ⁹⁸Badmashes were also portrayed as sexually immoral: the badmash of Benares apparently ‘corrupt[ed] the morals of the women’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Moreover, North Indian commentators denounced rapists as badmash and, conversely, claimed that robbers and badmash committed sexual violence against women in the course of their crimes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ To give just one example of many,Footnote ¹⁰¹ a report in the Lauh-i-Mahfuz of Moradabad denounced the Dom community—which the NWP government increasingly termed a criminal tribe—as ‘notorious robbers and budmashes’ and claimed that a Dom man had recently ‘ravished’ an Ahir woman (of comparatively higher-caste status) and then murdered her.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus, in the newspapers of this period, groups that the British labelled criminal tribes were often described as badmash, a figure that evoked improper work, unruly masculinity, immorality, and sexual violence against women.

This association with sexual violence does not appear prominently in colonial narratives of ‘criminal tribe’ masculinity. Nevertheless, British representations of criminal tribesmen resonated more generally with elite North Indians’ concerns about badmashes’ inappropriate livelihoods and disorderly masculinity. This was due to the centrality of industriousness and self-discipline to both Victorian British and middle-class Indian notions of masculinity.Footnote ¹⁰³ For the British, the threat of criminal tribe masculinity was twofold. On the one hand, ‘criminal tribesmen’ were apparently lazy, idle, and lacked the ‘will to work’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ J. R. Reid, the NWP secretary, lamented that ‘so long as they [the Sanorhiyas] are perfectly happy in idleness and the tranquil enjoyment of their kinsmen's plunder, they will not willingly undertake a life of agricultural labour’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, British officials claimed that ‘criminal tribesmen’ inevitably longed for the adventure and freedom of their criminal expeditions. According to Etah's magistrate, J. Smith, ‘the old love of roving, the old longing for a predatory life, would certainly break out and overcome every effort to induce habits of industry and steady perseverance’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In short, sexually immoral femininity and unproductive and turbulent masculinity were reoccurring themes in British formulations of the criminal tribe ‘problem’, which dovetailed with aspects of middle-class Indian representations of low-caste and ‘badmashi’ sections of society.

Producing productive families

Notions of the family were at the centre of the NWP's plan to reform the criminal tribes. The CTA applied to entire families, including children, and aimed to transform these ‘criminal’ families into productive households of tenant farmers. Of course, in the NWP everyone registered under the CTA had ‘fixed’ residences and a substantial number were tenant cultivators, but their agricultural work was apparently a cloak for theft.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The CTA provided for two possible methods: first, ‘a system of prevention, under which the members of the tribe are prevented, by registration and roll-call, from leaving their homes on predatory excursions’ and, second, ‘a system of repression by which they are removed from their homes to a compulsory place of residence, and forced to support themselves there by such employment as the Government provides’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The NWP chose the considerably cheaper ‘preventive’ option. While the Bawariyas would remain in the Bidauli colony established in 1863, this did not formally operate as a ‘reformatory settlement’, meaning that forced labour was not implemented. Nor would the NWP relocate the other registered groups to new reformatory settlements. However, stopping the ‘wanderings’ of registered people, would ‘force … [them] to confine themselves to the legitimate profession of agriculture’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Interestingly, this emphasis on reform-through-labour was more typical of British India's penal colonies, such as the Straits Settlements and the Andaman Islands, than the organization of jails in India.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Government of India pointed out that the NWP's ‘preventive’ approach to the ‘criminal tribes’ assumed that registered people already had tenancies on sufficient land or, alternatively, some other means of livelihood within the boundaries of their village.Footnote ¹¹¹ Although the NWP claimed that there was easy access to land and a demand for labour in the districts in question, this assumption turned out to be incorrect.Footnote ¹¹²

The NWP's rules on the enforcement of the CTA provided that the district magistrate should compile a register of members of the proclaimed ‘tribes’, which recorded physical appearance, age, place of residence, previous convictions, and other personal details. A registered person could not ‘leave the boundaries of the town or village in which he is a resident’ without a pass from the magistrate or district superintendent of police. This pass was ordinarily issued for up to 14 days for a specific route of travel and had to be presented on certain dates at particular police stations. The magistrate or superintendent was also required to hold a ‘roll call’ of registered people at irregular intervals.Footnote ¹¹³ In Etah, roll call was only held once a month during the 1870s, though it was conducted more often elsewhere.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, the requirement that every registered person had to ‘report himself or herself every evening to the village headman or police officer … appointed … by the Magistrate’ was a much greater intervention into everyday life than an intermittent roll call.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Although the British primarily associated criminality with ‘criminal tribesmen’, whole families were usually policed under the CTA. Women and children's personal details were recorded on the police registers, their movements were subject to the pass system, and they had to present themselves at the daily head count and periodic roll calls. In addition, section 18(8) of the CTA provided for the ‘inspection of the residences’ of registered people. Although ostensibly a measure to prevent the concealment of booty, section 18(8) also facilitated the ongoing surveillance of domestic spaces.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Meanwhile, the police registers organized individuals according to family, noting the ‘Name of the head of family’ and ‘Names of members of family with their relation to the head thereof’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The NWP also annually compiled statistics on the number of births in registered communities.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The ‘criminal tribe’ family was regulated and surveilled in these ways partly because the British claimed that ‘criminal’ caste occupations were passed down generationally within families.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But beyond this, the NWP government also aimed to create industrious and settled families. It effectively argued that sedentarization would encourage farming and thereby ‘dispose things’ in such a way as to create families of productive cultivators who were moral members of society.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1876, the NWP lieutenant-governor ‘trust[ed] that … it may be found possible to direct the energies of the proclaimed families to honest enterprize [sic]’.Footnote ¹²¹ Two years later, police official P. C. Dalmahoy argued that ‘[a]ll of the proclaimed families’ should be settled, ‘employment sufficient for their support should be found for them, and they must be made to work’.Footnote ¹²² For the NWP government, the ‘success’ of one Habura village in Etah district called Nagla Ram Lal was due not only to its industriousness—‘the residents having taken kindly to agriculture’—but also to the fact that this ‘little colony of ten families’ was based on the institution of the family.Footnote ¹²³

The agenda of creating productive ‘criminal tribe’ families conformed to colonial agrarianization policies that were propelled by the economic imperative of extending the revenue base.Footnote ¹²⁴ However, such agrarianization programmes were also underpinned by the colonial valorization of the Indian peasant family. Colonial officials viewed the patriarchal family as a bedrock of morally respectable Indian village life and thus assumed that any agrarian scheme targeting the ‘criminal tribes’ would have to be family-based.Footnote ¹²⁵ Similarly, in the 1880s in the newly irrigated Punjab Canal Colonies, colonial officials never contemplated recruiting a migrant workforce of single men—despite their demands for ‘sturdy’ male peasants—and instead recruited entire families to create a modern, orderly version of ‘traditional’ village life.Footnote ¹²⁶ Sen has also noted that efforts to create a self-sustaining penal colony in the Andaman Islands through the agricultural settlement of convict couples assumed that ‘a healthy society, one that was based on stable families, created individuals … [that] were orderly, productive, and politically desirable’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Thus, the family was at the centre of various colonial agrarian schemes in British India.

By the late 1870s, however, NWP officials had concluded that the Sanorhiyas were not a community comprising families, necessitating a differently gendered system of policing for them. J. Liston, the deputy commissioner of Lalitpur, argued that the Sanorhiyas ‘cannot properly be called a “tribe,” being of no particular caste or family’, demonstrating that a ‘criminal tribe’ was partly defined as a family-based entity.Footnote ¹²⁸ NWP officials reported that Sanorhiya boys were trained to commit crime within gangs, rather than within families.Footnote ¹²⁹ As Quinton, the commissioner of Jhansi, put it, ‘Sanoriahs as such are not born but made. The son of a Sanoriah does not necessarily follow the father's calling.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Given this, Liston concluded in 1879: ‘There is no such thing as a Sanoriah family, properly speaking.’Footnote ¹³¹ A consensus also emerged that ‘it is the males alone who sally out to plunder and the women stop at home’.Footnote ¹³² Female immobility and confinement to the home or village signalled law-abiding behaviour to British officials. The ‘settled’ character of Sanorhiya women meant that their mobility did not need to be restricted. In 1879, the NWP government ruled that only adult men and ‘boys who were found to have been initiated into this thieving fraternity should be registered’, while other children and all women were deregistered.Footnote ¹³³ Clearly, the CTA regime was family-based—and thus, according to officials, irrelevant to the Sanorhiyas. The CTA usually targeted the ‘criminal’ family, but in Lalitpur the law narrowly targeted male criminality.

Nevertheless, the NWP government continued to monitor Sanorhiya families through gathering statistics of the annual number of births and the extent of lands tenanted per family.Footnote ¹³⁴ Moreover, the idea of turning male Sanorhiyas’ families into industrious and settled domestic units retained its appeal. In the mid-1880s, the NWP government considered whether the relocation of the ‘criminal tribes’ to reformatory settlements would improve the system of policing. Yet since the Sanorhiya ‘fraternity’ was not made up of families, the creation of settlements for them appeared an uncertain prospect. Webster, the NWP inspector general of police, opined:

Notwithstanding these doubts, in 1884 the NWP attempted a small ‘experiment’ in which tenancies on two tracts of government-owned, uncultivated land were given to 16 Sanorhiya families who were ‘without visible means of subsistence’ and had volunteered for resettlement.Footnote ¹³⁶ Official accounts are filled with images of smiling, hard-working families who were busy building their homes, clearing the land, and planting crops such as kodom (a small millet) and bhindi (okra).Footnote ¹³⁷ The officiating commissioner of Jhansi reported in 1885 that, ‘During the rains they hutted themselves in sheds made of branches, straw, and leaves, and on our visit they all mustered in good health and spirits.’Footnote ¹³⁸ Later that year, the deputy commissioner reported that on a recent visit, he had found the families ‘contented and happy: they were busy building their houses’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Both officials suggested that it was through physical labour—particularly the taming of the wilderness and the building of family homes—that the Sanorhiyas had been transformed into happy families.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This ‘experiment’ shows that the family was pivotal to the CTA project, but it also suggests that this was not only due to ideologies of hereditary criminality: visions of settled, hard-working peasant families had a much broader appeal among colonial administrators.

Although NWP officials were preoccupied with the labour and livelihood of the ‘criminal tribe’ family, they did not attempt to micro-manage familial relations, such as parent-child relationships, during this self-consciously ‘experimental’, early phase of the CTA. The NWP government paid limited attention to the ‘reform’ of children, notwithstanding their registration under the law. Officials had established a Bawariya school in the 1860s, but after 1871 did not attempt new educational schemes.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Moreover, district administrators rarely detailed the extent to which children worked.Footnote ¹⁴² In contrast, colonial officials devoted a great deal of attention to the work of adult men and women. What, then, were the gendered repercussions of the governance of the family under the CTA?

Women's work and norms of femininity

Within the NWP's vision of industrious ‘criminal tribe’ families, adult women were expected to work, both on household and agricultural tasks. Colonial officials did not valorize women's labour, but they nevertheless regarded the toil of women as necessary for the transformation of the ‘criminal tribes’. In 1879, the commissioner of Meerut, W. C. Plowden, complained that Bawariya women incited men to go on thieving expeditions and would continue to do so, ‘so long as the women do not work’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Families in which women did not have a known means of livelihood were assumed to be criminal, especially if adult men had absconded. A register of Bawariyas noted of one absconded man, Gurdina, that ‘none of the family cultivate, and the vernacular report is silent as to how the woman earns a living’. Work on the family farm was the form of female labour that was most acceptable to the colonial state, whereas paid agricultural labour, forest gathering, and the production of consumer goods from gathered materials were suspect.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Colonial officials’ insistence that ‘criminal tribeswomen’ undertake work did not conform to Victorian notions of domesticity. Middle-class Britons saw the home as a feminine domain—separated from the morally corrupting, male world of work and politics—and viewed women's proper role as that of wife and mother, confined to the domestic sphere. Of course, this was a middle-class ideal that did not describe the conditions of most working-class, and even some middle-class, British women's lives.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that British administrators did not prescribe a model of domesticated femininity for criminalized Indian women. However, the NWP's disinterest in managing a gendered division of labour in ‘criminal tribe’ families differed from the policies implemented in British penal settlements for Indian convicts. In the Straits Settlements and Burma in the mid-1800s, convict labour was organized through a public/private spatial division. Women's work was generally ‘indoor labour’, within the prison and outside of public view, even when women did physically strenuous work like lime and cement production.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The authorities primarily viewed female convicts as potential marriage partners and gave women permission to live outside the prison if they married a male convict.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In the Andamans in the late 1800s, certain industries, such as weaving, were designated as women's work.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Yet in the context of the early CTA project, the NWP was not concerned with confining female labour to spaces or tasks that were domestic and feminine, according to colonial notions. For instance, in the official view, the fact that Bawariya women were in charge of cultivation in most registered families with tenancies was not a problem because of inappropriate female labour, but rather because it suggested widespread male absconding.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The NWP government failed to impose a gender division of labour due to colonial knowledge of gender and caste, in particular, assumptions about the types of work and public behaviours that were suitable for low-caste women, who were apparently beyond the bounds of feminine respectability. The 1879 removal of Sanorhiya women (of varied caste status) from the register, and thereby from concerted work demands, reinforces this interpretation. British officials viewed agricultural labour as entirely appropriate for low-caste, criminalized women, even though this undercut colonial notions of domesticated femininity, demonstrating the complex ways that gender discourses shaped colonial governance.

These colonial assumptions were shaped by the meanings of women's labour in rural India. To be sure, female involvement in agriculture—particularly in transplantation, weeding, and animal husbandry—was reasonably common in late nineteenth-century India. Women of humble means frequently worked in their family's fields or as agricultural labourers. However, relatively well-off social groups demonstrated their status by ‘subsum[ing]’ women's agricultural work ‘within the daily routine of domesticity’, outside of public view. Rural Indians increasingly saw female agricultural work outside of household compounds as immoral and not respectable.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Thus, one effect of the colonial encouragement of female labour in ‘criminal tribe’ communities was to circumscribe the ability of these groups to adopt strategies of social mobility that hinged on the domestication of women's work.

Making hard-working peasant men

The ‘lazy’ and ‘turbulent’ masculinity of ‘criminal tribesmen’ continued to preoccupy officials in their efforts to produce industrious families, since masculinity was a constitutive part of how colonial officials envisaged the process of agrarianization.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The regulation of mobility would create conditions in which a particular type of man—a hard-working peasant—could emerge.Footnote ¹⁵² To be sure, prior to the CTA, some NWP officials had doubted whether ‘criminal tribesmen’ could ever be ‘reformed’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Moreover, British officials occasionally suggested other methods of reform, aside from agricultural labour, such as the enlistment of registered men in the army.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In 1876, Sladen, the magistrate of Muzaffarnagar, commented on the Bawariyas: ‘They would fight well I should say.’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Indeed, during the First World War, the army would enlist some men who were registered under the CTA.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ However, between 1871 and 1890 the NWP administration saw cultivation as the primary route to men's rehabilitation.

The aim of making ‘criminal tribesmen’ into industrious agriculturalists resonated with broader colonial representations of the sturdy, hard-working Indian male peasant that were constructed in opposition to the lazy, wild, and lawless nomadic pastoralist.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Colonial administrators stressed that to become ‘steady’ peasants, ‘unsteady’ registered men needed to habituate themselves to the repetitive, hard physical work of the cultivator and to support their families though their own labour.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The NWP particularly underlined the importance of registered men cultivating their own family plots as tenant farmers, rather than labouring on the land of other men.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ For instance, officials viewed the exploitation of the Bidauli Bawariyas by their landlord, Mehndi Hassan Khan, not merely as a factor that drove Bawariyas to abscond, but also as a threat to the masculinity of Bawariya men. Khan had repeatedly granted Bawariyas tenancies on uncultivated land and once they had cleared the land, replaced them with non-Bawariya tenants, shifting the Bawariyas to new plots of ‘wasteland’, which they were again forced to clear. Several NWP officials wrote that Bawariya men's independence was threatened by their insecurity of tenure, since they were unable to enjoy the ‘fruits’ of their own labour. Hobart, the deputy inspector-general of police opined, ‘The future prosperity of the colony is truly threatened if men will not be allowed to enter into the fruits of their labours.’Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Similarly, the commissioner of Meerut, F. M. Lind, lamented that, ‘These men have broken up new lands and rendered them fit for cultivation, and they have done this under the confident expectation of reaping the fruits of their labour only to find that their hopes have been crushed, and their labour expended for the benefit of another man.’Footnote ¹⁶¹

The attempts of NWP officials to nurture independence and self-sufficiency in ‘criminal tribesmen’ drew upon the middle-class Victorian notion of ‘manly character’, the characteristics of which were independence and a strong work ethic, along with decisiveness, courage, straightforwardness, and social responsibility.Footnote ¹⁶² Honesty was also central to manly character and colonial concepts of ‘honest forms of livelihood’ were thus implicitly associated with masculinity. However, the idea of manly independence was premised on individualism, which Victorian Britons saw as a modern condition. As such, NWP officials’ hopes of promoting self-sufficiency and autonomy in ‘criminal tribesmen’ were somewhat at odds with commonplace colonial representations of Indian villages. European commentators generally agreed that there was ‘an absence of a free market, of individuals … and of a competitive spirit’ (the characteristics of the ‘modern’) in the ‘ancient community’ of the Indian village.Footnote ¹⁶³ Perhaps the emphasis on manly independence in discussions of the CTA was a consequence of the official view that in the case of the ‘criminal tribes’, the collective was precisely the problem.

Criminalized men sometimes argued for their deregistration so that they could achieve masculine mastery through ‘settling’ the land. Take, for instance, the complaints of the Sanorhiyas of Lalitpur in 1885: ‘The people now have a disliking to being registered and clamoured … for release. The reason they gave was that they are never their own masters; some one is forever looking them up for roll-call, or to be seen by the Inspector … and that they in consequence could settle nothing.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Criminalized men thus understood that for the colonial government, manliness was bound up with the physical exertion of clearing and cultivating the land and providing for one's family. Was this a strategic deployment of colonial discourse or an articulation of indigenous notions of manliness?

In Tamil-speaking southern India, Pandian has argued that from the medieval period, an ethic of ‘agrarian civility’ was evident, which celebrated the ploughman as ‘agrarian citizen’ and upheld the moral value of working the plough. Some groups that were labelled criminal tribes in the early twentieth century, like Kallars, were seen as the agrarian citizen's antithesis.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ However, in northern India, cultivation had a complicated and ambiguous relationship to masculinity. Attachment to the land was linked to rural notions of manliness, honour, and power,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ but the labour of cultivation could damage a man's status, due to the stigma that was connected to ploughing.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ For high-status groups like Rajputs, physical involvement in cultivation did not always lower their social rank, at least in regions where they were especially powerful. However, as low-caste people increasingly gained tenancies around the mid-nineteenth century, rural elites further emphasized the status fault line of manual work.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Moreover, Lalitpur, where the (mixed-caste) Sanorhiyas were registered, was one of several regions where high-caste groups did not perform manual labour,Footnote ¹⁶⁹ suggesting that the Sanorhiyas’ attachment to farming was a strategic discourse meant for colonial ears. Since North Indian rural elites did not idealize the figure of the male cultivator, Shudra groups that staked claims to higher-caste Kshatriya identities often relinquished the plough.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Nevertheless, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Dalit communities persistently defended their rights as tenants, illustrating the economic and social importance of cultivation to them, with their often-limited and precarious tenancy rights. Agricultural labour was also vital to the religious practices of Chamar and other Dalit cultivators, including rituals like the worship of the plough.Footnote ¹⁷¹ By the early twentieth century, both Dalit and Shudra activists would assert the ‘dignity’ of the ploughman, although many Shudras claimed an Aryan origin narrative, while Dalits increasingly distanced themselves from the Hindu community.Footnote ¹⁷² Whether low-caste discourses celebrating agricultural work shaped late nineteenth-century colonial policies is questionable, given the colonial bias towards elite informants. Nevertheless, while high-status communities did not associate the manual labour of cultivation with manliness and honour, many low-caste communities appear to have validated the figure of the ploughman. Low-status criminalized men may have articulated similar discourses, yet the capacity of ‘criminal tribesmen’ to gain a living solely from cultivation as a tenant farmer was extremely limited under the CTA.

Failures of policing and failures of masculinity

According to the NWP government, the project to transform ‘criminal tribe’ families into agriculturalists produced, at best, mixed results. By the late 1870s, there was an official consensus that the Bidauli colony had failed due to Mehndi Hassan Khan's mistreatment of the Bawariyas, their insecure tenancies, and male absconding. As such, the Bawariyas in Muzaffarnagar district were deregistered in mid-1879.Footnote ¹⁷³ The Aheriyas and Haburas remained on the registers until 1892–3, while the Sanorhiyas continued to be subjected to the CTA into the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Yet the NWP doubted that these communities would ever become hard-working agriculturalists.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The Sanorhiya colonies set up in 1884 were deemed a failure within six years. Visions of agricultural rehabilitation lingered, but the NWP increasingly proposed that newly notified ‘criminal tribes’ be ‘provided’ with ‘menial’ labour, as watchmen, sweepers, brick-makers, construction ‘coolies’, and factory workers.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

British officials often viewed the disappointing results of the CTA as a consequence of the failed masculinity of criminalized men. In 1878, Tyrwhitt, the inspector-general of police, wrote, the ‘criminal tribes are not content to live on the hard fare of the village ryot's coarse bread and dal, [since] they have been accustomed to get the very best of food without stint … [rather than] by the sweat of their brow’. So-called criminal tribesmen would never ‘value’ any means of livelihood ‘if it does not include the luxuries of good food for themselves and jewelry for their women’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ In 1879, Robertson, the NWP secretary, was ‘at a loss to conceive how it could have ever been supposed’ that restrictions on Bawariyas’ mobility ‘would be enough to induce them to desert the lucrative and easy profession of thieving, to which they were born and bred, for the hard and precarious life of an agriculturalist’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Later that year, Robertson complained that the ‘reclamation’ of Sanorhiya men who ‘have no taste for the hard and uncertain nature of agricultural toil’ and ‘are accustomed to get the best food with a minimum of trouble … is in fact well nigh helpless’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This discourse of inherent criminality is predictable, given that this was ‘colonial common sense’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ However, the importance of the part played by bodily dispositions and food habits to the ostensible failure of ‘criminal tribe’ masculinity is striking. According to colonial officials, these men did not have the will to endure the physically strenuous work of cultivation, nor did they have the character to undergo the sensory and bodily deprivation of coarse peasant food.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Colonial officials also pointed to another failure of masculinity: ‘criminal tribesmen’ were content to let other men provide for their families. Plowden, Meerut's commissioner, claimed that the Bawariya ‘who would be inclined to work if he could eat the fruit of his labour, finds himself burdened with a number of hungry mouths which should be filled by the exertions of others who either sit at home doing nothing or confine their exertions to theft’.Footnote ¹⁸² Lazy ‘criminal tribesmen’ had apparently failed to become self-sufficient, industrious householders and had abdicated their duties as husbands and fathers. Indians involved in the administration of the CTA also attributed its failure to criminal tribe masculinity. For instance, Mehndi Hassan Khan, the landlord of the Bidauli Bawariya colony, attempted to divert official criticism of his management by pleading, ‘I am afraid to put on the screw at all [in discipline and the collection of revenue], as the men are turbulent, and I am afraid of them.’Footnote ¹⁸³

These critical descriptions of registered men's masculinity ignored the most significant hurdle to the NWP's plan to produce cultivators—the landlessness of many registered people. Between one-third and a half of people criminalized under the CTA were landless. In Etah district in 1881, while 67 Aheriya families were tenant farmers, 64 families did not have tenancies.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ In Lalitpur, 58 registered Sanorhiya men held land, but 31 were landless.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The landless Aheriya and Habura families made their living by ‘daily labor’ on other people's lands, making strings and baskets, cutting grass and firewood, and extracting dhak tree resin for the preparation of indigo.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Despite this varied labour, colonial officials claimed that landless people were living off crime. The Indian police consequently kept landless families under close surveillance.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Yet the NWP made only halting and limited efforts to solve the problem of landlessness. The disparaging attitudes of rural elites towards socially marginalized peoples who had ‘a bad reputation to start with’ apparently made it difficult to cajole rural landowners into giving tenancies to landless families.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In Etah by the mid-1880s, the authorities had achieved moderate success in securing tenancies for Aheriyas and Haburas, though many still had no land.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Gendered strategies of evasion and coping

Landlessness was one of several factors that led registered people to abscond, either by leaving without a pass or not returning after their pass had expired. Although entire families sometimes decamped, it was common for one or two members of a household to be absent, while the rest stayed behind. Due to the CTA pass system, landless registered people were usually unable to look for work outside their village. Their standard of living was reportedly precarious and, consequently, many left either permanently or temporarily.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Even people with land were often in difficult circumstances because of their small or insecure tenancies. For instance, landholding Sanorhiyas held seven bighas on average,Footnote ¹⁹¹ which ‘it would be impossible for these people to live on’. The inspector-general of police wrote that unless registered people had more substantial tenancies, they would have nothing ‘worth staying home for’ and would abscond.Footnote ¹⁹² Bad seasons and periods of famine affected registered people particularly badly, because their mobility—and thus their ability to find food and employment—was restricted. The ‘Great Famine’ of 1876–8 drove large numbers of registered people to escape, due to ‘the absolute inability of the people to find a living in their own district’.Footnote ¹⁹³ In 1879, Aheriyas and Haburas were still ‘on the verge of starvation’ in several villages and 67 people consequently absconded.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Thus, numerous economic pressures were exacerbated by the CTA and pushed registered people to use mobility as a strategy of evasion and survival. In addition, the increased presence of the police in registered peoples’ everyday lives—a presence that was often harassing and violent—was a major reason why they ran away. W. Kaye, the commissioner of Jhansi, concluded that many Sanorhiyas had fled Lalitpur district because ‘the police are inclined to be too strict’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

British officials generally assumed that absconders were taking part in thieving expeditions.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ In particular, administrators claimed that absent men were engaged in theft, since they primarily viewed male, not female, mobility as an indication of criminality.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ It was reasonably common for rural people who had fallen on hard times to steal to supplement their incomes.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Criminalized men may have celebrated the masculine vigour of thievery ‘for its defiance of restraint’ in a ‘counter to the moral projects of the state’, which Pandian argues some men from the formerly notified Kallar community do in southern India today.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ While it is impossible to determine the extent to which absconders actually committed crime, it is clear that some were not ‘wandering’ but had settled elsewhere. For example, in 1875 several Aheriya families escaped from their village, Jagatpur, and ‘settled for a time in the Kásganj circle’, to the north of Etah.Footnote ²⁰⁰

Interestingly, the gender dynamics of illegal mobility differed between the registered communities. By 1879, women dominated the adult population of the Bawariya colony in Bidauli because of the greater extent of male absconding. Whereas adult males had comprised around 30 per cent of the original 1,200-strong Bidauli population, by 1879 they made up only 13 per cent of the 844 remaining inhabitants.Footnote ²⁰¹ In the majority of tenant farming families, Bawariya women either oversaw cultivation by hiring labourers—generally landless Bawariya men and women or Gurjar pastoralists—or were themselves directly involved in cultivation, which they carried out with the assistance of young people and female relatives.Footnote ²⁰² In contrast to largely male mobility in the Bawariya community, Aheriya and Habura women absconded more frequently than men in the 1870s and 1880s. In some years, roughly equal numbers of adult men and women violated the pass system: in 1878, for instance, 28 men, 31 women, and 32 children.Footnote ²⁰³ Yet in most years, female absconders outnumbered their male counterparts considerably: in 1880, 25 women, 10 men, and 13 children, while in 1881, 40 women, 22 men, and 26 children left without permission.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Prior to the enforcement of the CTA, British officials had reported that Bawariyas, Aheriyas, and Haburas were generally ‘settled’, but that the men migrated seasonally or periodically.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Assuming that these reports were accurate, under the CTA a shift evidently occurred in patterns of mobility among the Aheriya and Habura, as adult women migrated more often than men. In contrast, among registered Bawariyas, men remained more mobile than women. In fact, the predominantly male migration that administrators noticed in these communities prior to the CTA was typical of rural North India and Bengal. In situations where tenancies were inadequate to support a family, men usually migrated, leaving behind their wives and children to take care of cultivation and other subsistence activities, since access to land was an ‘insurance against starvation’. For most rural people, the migration of families and single women was a last resort.Footnote ²⁰⁶ The apparent increase in female mobility in the registered Aheriya and Habura populations was largely a consequence of gendered policing practices under the CTA. Compared with Muzaffarnagar, where Bawariyas were registered, the Etah authorities were reluctant to punish Aheriya and Habura women, who apparently did ‘not steal’.Footnote ²⁰⁷ In 1879, the magistrate reported that men ‘alone are punished’ for absconding.Footnote ²⁰⁸ While Aheriya and Habura women's high degree of mobility was shaped by the CTA, female migration was hardly unheard of in socially marginalized groups. Samita Sen notes that poorer women ‘constituted a mobile labour force’ that was deployed to the households of various affinal and natal relatives, depending on ‘where the demand was greatest’.Footnote ²⁰⁹ When women migrated under the CTA, they probably fulfilled similar labour needs within extended kin networks. Given the gendered enforcement of the CTA in Etah district, women became a more flexible and useful ‘mobile labour force’ than men.

Criminalized groups also attempted to work within the CTA system and co-opt it to their own ends, though different forms of leverage were available to men and women. Men who were recognized as leaders of their communities could increase their status or secure economic benefits. British district officials were always on the lookout for ‘leading men’ who could act as go-betweens and influence their fellow ‘tribesmen’.Footnote ²¹⁰ There is a longer history to these patronage ties: in the 1830s, William Sleeman had allowed ‘thug’ police informers whom he considered especially impressive gang leaders to reside in his compound with their families.Footnote ²¹¹ British officials regarded relationships with powerful men in ‘criminal tribe’ communities as crucial to establishing ‘intimate personal knowledge of and sympathy with’ these groups.Footnote ²¹²

Although the British viewed these as paternalistic relationships, ‘leading men’ sought to manoeuvre these ties to their advantage. For instance, after the CTA was introduced to Etah, the authorities identified a Habura named Ram Lal as an ‘influential’ man. Subsequently, he led a group of registered Haburas to a tract of uncultivated land where they set up a new village, which Ram Lal named ‘Nagla Rám Lál Budduck’ after himself. The Etah authorities decided not to proclaim the new village under the CTA and the inhabitants were consequently deregistered.Footnote ²¹³ Aikman, the magistrate, felt that this was ‘not of great consequence, as from all accounts the colony has been a great success’. In 1883, Ram Lal's relationship with local authorities again came in handy when the magistrate prevented Ram Lal's zamindar from ejecting the Haburas.Footnote ²¹⁴ Being recognized as a ‘leading man’ allowed Ram Lal to become a village headman, to escape the CTA, and to secure official protection from his landlord. Similarly, local authorities granted a ‘farm’ to a Sanorhiya named Ghariba Dubey because he was a ‘great leader’ and a ‘noted man among the brotherhood’.Footnote ²¹⁵ However, these relationships of patronage were fragile and conflict prone. In the mid-1870s, a man named Chathurwa, who was the ‘leading spirit’ of the Bawariya colony at Bidauli, was killed in a hand-to-hand fight with Mr Williams, the district superintendent of police, in murky circumstances. The NWP government feared that this would be a disaster for relations with the Bawariyas, but Chathurwa's son ‘was found to be one of the most prosperous and contented of the colonists’ and soon took his father's place as the ‘leading spirit’.Footnote ²¹⁶ In sum, notions of masculine power and authority shaped the everyday interactions of criminalized groups with Indian and British officials.

Aside from ‘leading men’, other registered men attempted to leverage the CTA regime by becoming police informants or finding employment with the police.Footnote ²¹⁷ Some women were also incorporated into the system of policing as informers. For instance, by 1877, 31 men were arrested at the Etawah train station with ‘spoil’ from ‘wandering excursions’ ‘through the instrumentality of one Musammát Nirma’, a female Bawariya informer.Footnote ²¹⁸ In the late 1880s, news that Bawariya informers had ‘played the game of their brethren—repressed reports and [taken] bribes’ remained a cautionary tale for officials.Footnote ²¹⁹ Although this lesson was premised on the stereotype of the untruthful native, it also suggests that male and female informers utilized their positions in ways unintended by the colonial state.

Another way for women to manoeuvre within the penal system was to engage in a sexual relationship with a colonial official, usually an Indian policeman.Footnote ²²⁰ Evidently, gender hierarchies and stereotypes of low-caste women's sexual availability patterned registered women's encounters with agents of the colonial state. In 1879, G. L. Ogilvie, Muzaffarnagar's superintendent, commented in passing: ‘I know even Bauriahs living in this district who are not proclaimed. One Bauriah woman even is kept by a constable in this place.’Footnote ²²¹ The magistrate's subsequent investigation suggested that, ‘The woman living with a constable was kept by a constable before the registration [under the 1871 CTA], and on his death took up with another, and is now living with him at Muzaffarnagar.’Footnote ²²² It seems that the Bawariya woman's relationship with her first constable partner had begun in the mid-1860s, following the relocation of 1,200 Bawariyas to Bidauli in 1863. Given that this unnamed woman had avoided registration under the CTA, we could interpret this as an example of her agency. Yet that she ‘took up’ with another constable following the death of her first partner, perhaps suggests that a high level of dependency was involved. Moreover, it is possible that either payment or coercion, or both, played a role in her relationships with the policemen. In the 1870s, there were numerous reports in North Indian newspapers of policemen ‘keep[ing] prostitutes near their chowkees’.Footnote ²²³ Such claims were inflected by middle-class Indian journalists’ harsh criticism of the police and were made ambiguous by the moralized and amorphous category of ‘prostitute’; nevertheless, they suggest the sexual trade that existed around police stations. There is also firm evidence from the early 1900s that ‘criminal tribe’ women in South India regularly experienced sexual violence at the hands of the police.Footnote ²²⁴ If the unnamed Bawariya woman had attempted to leverage her sexuality to avoid criminalization and registration, she did so against a broader backdrop of sexual commerce and sexual abuse centred on police stations.