Colonial construction of criminality a study of ex criminal tribes of Punjab

Abstract

The thesis examines the historical criminalization of tribal communities in Punjab. These communities include Sansis, Harnis, Pakhivar, Bauriya, Gurmang, Batuchi, Mahatam, Mina, Nat, Banzara, and Bazigar, among others. Focusing on the Criminal Tribes Act (1871), the thesis examines the act of criminalization as an unstable, but mutually constituting, network of historical forces: first, the political system of colonial domination, second, the economic injunctions of a new regime of agrarian economy, and third, the native structure of the caste system. This thesis shows that the colonial legal apparatus of criminalization was designed to discipline a group of tribal communities whose traditional pre-colonial habitus had been increasingly threatened by the advent of British colonization. When these tribes refused to be converted into landless labourers, the British administration responded by legally targeting them as thieves and dacoits. Drawing on a large body of colonial British archives, this thesis scrutinizes the colonial processes of surveillance and control at the microscopic level of specific villages and rural settlements. Simultaneously, it also tracks the structural power of colonial domination. In colonial Punjab, these processes of criminalization acquired specific institutional forms. The power of the colonial British state was emblematized by the following institutions: reformatory settlements, industrial settlements, and agricultural settlements. This thesis unravels the history of criminalization in Punjab as a chronicle of coerced deportations, land grabs, imprisonments, and forced labour. newline