by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear Reader,
Pure coincidence, perhaps, that in the same week two conversations in this magazine circled the word “criminal”. In one, the public intellectual and activist G.N. Devy warned that India’s forthcoming caste census risks repeating an old injustice by failing to properly enumerate denotified and nomadic tribes—communities branded as hereditary offenders under colonial rule and never fully released from that suspicion. In another, filmmaker and theatre director Dakxin Chhara described what it means to grow up inside a community officially “denotified” yet socially unpardoned, where the label outlives the law that produced it. Their testimonies suggest something that criminology textbooks rarely acknowledge directly: the history of crime is really the history of who had the power to define harm. And more often than not, the law has been less a neutral referee and more a property manager.
Consider the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, enacted by the British Raj in India after the 1857 rebellion. The Act branded entire communities—an estimated 13 million people across 127 groups by Independence—as “habitually criminal”, addicted to the “systematic commission of non-bailable offences”. No individual act was required for conviction; membership in a designated caste or tribe was sufficient. Surveillance, forced settlement, routine reporting to police stations, restrictions on movement: these measures were justified in the language of public safety. Yet their underlying function was administrative control over mobile populations who did not fit neatly into the colonial economy of land revenue and fixed property. As historian Meena Radhakrishna has documented, many of these “criminal tribes” were simply nomadic communities whose wandering lives made colonial administrators anxious, or groups whose labour was needed for plantations and public works. The law defined mobility as menace. Their “criminality” was invented to solve a logistics problem.
The Act was repealed in 1949, but its logic stays. The Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 effectively re-listed the same communities under a different name. In 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted with concern that these “so-called denotified and nomadic tribes” continue to be stigmatised. Today, approximately 60 million people in India live under the shadow of this colonial label. Many remain excluded from Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe status, denied the reservations that might lift them from poverty. The label may have been withdrawn; the stigma was not. In that sense, the census debate is not merely bureaucratic. It is philosophical. It asks whether the state can count people without categorising them into inherited guilt.
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