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In 1932, a British army officer,Lieutenant General Sir GeorgeMacMunn, wrote a book called

The Underworld of India. In this not-quite-scholarly treatise, MacMunnrambles at length about all that hefound dark and dreaded while on histour of duty in India. In a chapter titled“Criminal Tribes and Classes,”MacMunn wrote: “They areabsolutely the scum, the flotsam andjetsam of Indian life, of no moreregard than the beasts of the field.”

Sprinkled through the rest of thechapter are several other referencesto such tribes, all as derogatory. TheChantichors (“bundle-stealers”) areall “feckless and unstable.” Harnishave a “gift for humbugging theworld.” Ramoshis were employed bythe British as watchmen, but such awatchman “is always an incorrigiblepander, being prepared to produceladies of the flimsiest virtue at theshortest notice.” Vanjari women are“bright and comely [with] well-moulded breasts,” and are “adept nodoubt in venery.” In fact, MacMunnmakes it a point to comment on thewomen of nearly every tribe. Hementions: all are invariably “comely”yet “hopelessly immoral.”(MacMunn also has an astonishingtendency to refer to women as“baggages”, but I’ll let that pass).

In 1871, the British passed the“Criminal Tribes Act.” It notifiedabout 150 tribes around India ascriminal, giving the police widepowers to arrest them and monitortheir movements. The effect of thislaw was simple: just being born intoone of those 150 tribes made you acriminal. As T.V. Stephens, a Britishofficial of the time, said whileintroducing the Bill that became theAct: “... people from time immemorialhave been pursuing the caste system

defined job-positions: weaving,carpentry and such were hereditaryjobs. So there must have beenhereditary criminals also who pursuedtheir forefathers’ profession.”

Why did the British feel a needfor such an Act? Arguably, it was partof an entire model of how law andorder was to be preserved in colonialIndia. To the British, used as theywere to a highly centralizedgovernance, India seemed a hair-raisingly volatile place with itscomplex array of castes andcommunities, functioning asautonomous, self governing entities,following differnent life styles andsocial norms. Those communities,which offered the stiffest resistanceto pax -Britannica, were targeted in

different ways for such specialtreatment. Among the worst victimswere communities which did not havea sedentary life style which made itmore difficult to demand subserviencefrom them.

A strategy was evolved toconcentrate the limited resources andefforts of the police on selected,visible targets. This was the only wayto give the appearance of effectivelyguaranteeing “public peace” . InImperial Power and PopularPolitics: Class, Resistance and theState in India 1850-1950, theCambridge University historian,Rajnarayan Chandavarkar explains:“[The police had] necessarily to relyupon a general consensus about

Declared Criminal at BirthIndia’s “Denotified Tribes”

Dilip D’Souza�

Pardhi family, Rajaley. Photo taken in June 1999

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which groups in society wereespecially prone to criminal activityand might constitute, therefore, theproper objects of policing. ... Byenacting this principle of selection [ofparticular groups], the colonial statewas able to create criminal tribes andcastes.”

Chandavarkar writes that eventhough they were the focus of muchpolice action, “the criminal tribes werescarcely, by the late nineteenthcentury, a potent threat tosocial order."

Criminal tribes were just aconvenient target, a scapegoat. Byacting against them, the state couldkeep up at least a pretence of lawenforcement, even if a lot more crime

happened and was left unpunished.Chandavarkar writes: “While in realitycrime went largely unreported andunrecorded, police reports andmemoirs ... described in painstakingdetail, crimes of savage brutality orextraordinary guile and cunning orthose which reflected exotic customsand elaborate rituals. This wasparticularly the case with ... thecriminal tribes and castes, whosesupposed criminality was representedas an inheritance and a profession,inextricably connected to their lineageand genealogy.”

In those lurid police records wasborn a view of certain tribes that madeit easy to call them criminal. It appearsrepeatedly in the Gazettes, the

remarkably detailed accounts byBritish officials of happenings in thedistricts. For instance, Volume XII ofthe 1880 Bombay Presidency Gazettehas these remarks about Pardhis,groups of whom this author has beenspending time with in ruralMaharashtra state: “They are still fondof hunting and poaching and have notgot rid of their turn for thieving.... ThePhase Pardhi [a sub-tribe] is nearlyalways ragged and dirty, walking witha sneaking gait.”

“A sneaking gait”: not verydifferent from the attitude thatpermeates the writing of Lt. Gen.George MacMunn.

Unfortunately, attitudes like thathave long outlived the British

Damned at BirthThe 1871 Criminal Tribes Act was a product of the climate and attitudes, that had prevailed for years before. Many of the tribeswe call denotified (DNT) today had been seen as criminal for a long time. The Act was just a formalisation of this view, fueled bythe attitudes and the model of policing, Chandavarkar writes about:

To understand this, take Ramoshis, a tribe found in Maharashtra. They find repeated unsavoury mention in older accounts. Onthe principle of “setting a thief to catch a thief”, Ramoshis in particular were widely hired as guards. Today, they are better knownas watchmen rather than as criminals. The stigma itself has stimulated a curious inversion of prejudice.

Ramoshi prowess at this profession brought about an intriguing page in their history. The Bombay Presidency Gazette of 1885tells the story:

The Ramoshis ... on many occasions exerted themselves greatly in Shivaji’s service ... Shivaji, who was anxious to getpossession of Purandhar, sent a detachment from Sinhagad accompanied by a party of Ramoshis to surprise the Mussalmangarrison and capture the fort. ... A Ramoshi ... ascended the wall and attached to the top of the rope ladders they carriedwith them. But as the Ramoshis were ascending the wall, the sentry in the vicinity descried them and cut the ropes, and theescalading party were all precipitated to the bottom, some being killed and the rest desperately wounded.

Now Shivaji campaigned in the second half of the 1600s. By that time, Ramoshis had already been through three phases of publicperception. They were looked upon as criminals. Then they were thought of as valiant guards against other criminals. Finallythey earned Shivaji’s trust as equally valiant fellow-warriors.

And yet, all their bravery and “exertion” on their behalf does not seem to have done their reputation any good. A century later,they were back to being “incorrigible thieves.” In the same Gazette, there is this passage about both, their supposed doings andthe persecution they suffered in the 1700s:

About 1730, the Ramoshis became extremely troublesome, assembling in large bodies and plundering in every direction. ...They were looked upon as a degraded caste and incorrigible thieves ... and perpetrated many outrages. ... About 1764 PilajiJadhavrav was appointed sarnaik of the Ramoshis. ... He executed a large number of them. ... His brother Sambhaji waspresented with a sword and permitted to put five Ramoshis to death every day.

While looking at the history of DNTs, at the Act that came to govern their lives, we must understand that this is the milieu inwhich they lived, in which that Act was passed. It was a time in which such feelings about entire communities were not onlyprevalent, but were not seen as particularly unusual either.

TV Stephens, Member of the Law and Order Commission, while introducing the Bill that became the 1871 Act, observed thatsuch tribes were criminals from times immemorial :

They are destined by the usages of caste to commit crime and their descendants will be offenders against law until the wholetribe is exterminated or accounted for in the manner of Thugs. ... I may almost say his religion is to commit crime.

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administration in India. Thisis true even though a newlyindependent India repealedthe Criminal Tribes Act in1952. That being so, theywere no longer to be called“criminal”, but “denotifiedtribes.” Nevertheless, nearlyhalf-a century later, they arestill routinely called criminal.

I found a typical examplein The Telegraph newspaper(Calcutta, July 31 1998). Areport about a series ofrobberies by Pardhis in thestate of Madhya Pradeshsays, Pardhis are “identifiedas having criminalantecedents,” that they are“listed as [a] criminal ethnicgroup.” (This is a lie,because such listing lapsedwhen the CT Act wasrepealed in 1952). Besides,the Chief Minister of thestate is quoted complainingthat his state’s “projects toprovide these people witheducation did not have any impact ontheir criminal instincts.”

When the highest elected officialin a state refers to the “criminalinstincts” of these tribals, andnewspapers write about their “criminal

antecedents”, there seems little hopethat they will ever be seen as ordinaryIndians. Sure enough, nearlyeveryone I have spoken to aboutPardhis — policemen, industrialists,students, professors, villagers — has

Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action GroupThe Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group (DNT-RAG) was founded after a conference in Baroda in March 1998.Mahashweta Devi, the Bengali writer-activist, had been invited to give a lecture there. She spoke of her work with the KheriaSabar ex-criminal tribe in West Bengal, leading to the formation of DNT-RAG. Three people founded it: Laxman Gaikwad, anaward-winning author and activist from Maharashtra, himself a member of the Uchlya denotified tribe; Dr GN Devy, an ex-professor of English at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, a well-known writer himself and head of the Bhasha ResearchCentre to research tribal languages that runs a yearly lecture series; and Mahashweta Devi.

DNT-RAG has worked on getting justice for the families of Pinya Kale and Budhan Sabar (a DNT member similarly killed inWest Bengal); and were able to get the killers of Bhikabhai Bajania (a member of Gujarat’s Bajania tribe) in Ahmedabad arrested.DNT-RAG has also held numerous meetings in small towns in Gujarat, Bengal and Maharashtra; besides setting up fourcommunity development centres for these tribes. It compiled and submitted a comprehensive report to the NHRC on the statusof DNTs. It has campaigned for the repeal of the Habitual Offenders’ Act which is routinely used to torment DNTs.

DNT-RAG publishes Budhan (named for Budhan Sabar) every two months. This journal carries news and research reports aboutDNTs.

assumed that they have apropensity for crime. Such anassumption is the startingpoint for discussion.

This is not to say thatmembers of such tribes donot indulge in crime. They do,and their crimes range fromstealing pomegranates fromfields to burglaries in whichpeople get murdered. Aretired police constable I metin Satara district showed meseveral lists of Pardhi tolisor gangs, each centred onone family that wander thedistrict committing crimes. Heknew the particular methodsof each toli. The policestation in Phaltan, a largetown in the district, haspictures of several Pardhiswanted for area crimes, someof whose names were in thetolis that the retiredconstable showed me.

Without doubt, there arePardhis who commit

crimes.But there are reasons for suchcrimes. They deserve consideration.Take what Stephen Fuchs wrote inThe Aboriginal Tribes of India (1973):“A number of such tribes arepassionately nomadic, and since

Rickshaw and Biscuit, June 1999

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foodgathering and hunting inthe jungle, in the traditionalmanner, is often impossible,they have switched over tothe rather dangerous ... life of‘foraging’ in the fields,villages and towns. ... Thishas gained them a badreputation and in the Britishtimes some of them werebranded criminal and heldunder close policesupervision. SinceIndependence this stigma hasbeen taken from them, but thewatch over them by the policehas not much relaxed. ... Theyare forced by the prevailingadverse circumstances topractise subsistencethieving.”

If there are Pardhis whocommit crimes, at least partof the blame lies in the factthat life “in the traditionalmanner” is no longer anoption. Part of the blame alsolies with societal attitudes that leavethem with no choice. Time and again,I have met Pardhis who tell me thelocal schools do not allow theirchildren to attend classes. If they domanage to stay in school andgraduate, jobs are hard to get. After ameeting near Phaltan where severalspeakers urged Pardhis to educatetheir children, and especially theirgirls, one woman stopped me outsideand pointed to her grown daughter.“I struggled so she could graduatefrom school,” she said. “But nownobody will give her a job becauseshe is a Pardhi. What’s the use of allthis talk of education?”

So Pardhis continue to be seen ascriminal. The police continue to roundthem up every time there is a crime —petty or major — in the area. This

usually means just one thing: athrashing in the police station. Thatis what happened to a Pardhi calledPinya Hari Kale at the Baramati (SataraDistrict, Maharashtra) police station,on June 8 1998.

Like many Pardhis in Satara, 35 -year-old Kale was a landlessagricultural labourer. His 1000 rupeesa month was the only income availableto support his wife and five children.Late on June 8, three constablespicked up Kale in Baramati. Now sincethe arrest of Pardhis on suspicion is apurely normal thing, Kale’s wifeChandrasena wasn’t particularlyperturbed when he did not returnhome that night. As she told theBombay High Court in a petition, she“expected him to be detained andreleased.”

That did not happen.When she went to the policestation to ask after him thenext day, two constablesshowed her his dead body.

A local magistrate and adoctor at Baramati’s GoldenJubilee Hospital producedan extraordinary post-mortem report that absolvedthe police altogether,corroborating their claim thatKale “fell down” while tryingto run from the constablesand died soon after. Asecond post-mortem, atChandrasena’s insistence,found “evidence of multipleconcussions”, 14 in number.It concluded that Kale haddied “due to multiple bluntinjuries with evidence ofhead injury.”

Because of theseconflicting post-mortemreports, an official of thePune Criminal InvestigationDepartment, BN Mane, wasasked to investigate Kale’s

death. He found that at the policestation, the three constables and asub-inspector had beaten Kale “withsticks and belt.” Because of this, Kaledied early on June 9. The sub-inspector’s report about the incidentsaid Kale died accidentally; Maneterms this a “false and concoctedstory.”

Mane has filed complaints againstall four men. They are undersuspension, while a furtherinvestigation takes place.

Clearly, given Mane’s findings, thestate itself has concluded that Kalewas killed in police custody. Yet, formonths, it did not pay his family anycompensation, let alone show that itintends to punish the four policemen.Chandrasena’s petition, now makingslow progress through the courts,asks for both these measures.

S.K. Pant and his son Chenne, Satara Distt.

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It is important to understand thatwhat happened to Kale is entirelytypical of what happens to denotifiedtribes. Police harrassment happenssolely because these tribes are seenas criminal: too often, suchharrassment results in death. That isthe spectre India’s ex-criminal tribesface every day.

There are, nevertheless, somesigns of hope. DNT-RAG (see box)informed the National Human RightsCommission about Pinya Kale’sdeath. The NHRC’s response got farless attention than it deserved. OnDecember 22, 1998, it ruled that “forthe limited purpose of awardinginterim relief,” it is not necessary towait for charges against the fourpolicemen to be proved in a criminalcourt. A “strong prima facie case” is

Confronting Discrimination Head OnMost of us from third world countries discrimination in some form or another almost everyday. It often leaves asour taste in our mouth. The following story, downloaded from the internet, shows us the side of human dignityand respect for that would help build a more egalitarian world. The following incident provides a sense of hope forit shows there are companies and individuals who confront discrimination head on, if only one small step at atime.

On a British Airways flight from Johannesburg, a middle-aged, well-off white South African Lady found herselfsitting next to a black man. She called the cabin crew attendant over to complain about her seating. "What is theproblem Madam?” asked the attendant. “Can’t you see?” she said “ You’ve sat me next to a kaffir. I can’t possiblysit next to this disgusting human. Find me another seat!” “Please calm down Madam.” the stewardess replied.“The flight is very full today. I’ll go and check to see if we have any seats available in club or first class.”

The woman cocks a snooty look at the outraged black man beside her, not to mention many of the surroundingpassengers. A few minutes later the stewardess returned with the good news, which she delivered to the lady,who could help but look at the people around her with a smug and self-satisfied grin: “Madam, I’ve spoken to thecabin services director. Unfortunately, the economy class is full as also the club class. However, we do have oneseat in the first class”. Before the lady has a chance to answer, the stewardess continued..."It is most extraordinaryto make this kind of upgrade. However, I have had to get special permission from the captain. Given thecircumstances, the captain felt that it was outrageous that someone be forced to sit next to such an obnoxiousperson.” With that, she turned to the black man sitting next to the lady, and said: “Sir if you’d like to get your thingstogether, I have a seat ready for you...” At that point, apparently the surrounding passengers stood up and gave astanding ovation, while the black guy walked up to the front of the plane.

People will forget what you said .... people will forget what you did ...... but people will never forget how you madethem feel.

Sent byNitasha Kalra,

San Jose, USA

sufficient; and BN Mane’sinvestigation clearly makes just sucha case.

The NHRC directed the State ofMaharashtra to pay Kale’s family Rs2,00,000 in compensation. It alsodirected the State to consider actionagainst the magistrate and the doctorwho conducted the first post-mortem,for “doctoring the inquest report tosuit the offenders.” The punitiveaction has not happened yet.But inFebruary 1999,the Government ofMaharashtra responded to theNHRC’s direction by issuinginstructions to pay the Rs 2,00,000compensation. On April 9, a policeinspector at the Baramati PoliceStation handed over the money to theKale family: Rs 25,000 was in cash andthe rest was invested in three-year

term deposits in the names of Pinya’swife and children.Cases like this may be the first signsof a small turn in the tide. In awardingcompensation and recommendingthat police officers be punished, thestate implicitly recognizes the rightsof such tribes, the injustice that theylive under daily. This does not yetamount to much. In particular, weneed to see if the policemen are reallypunished. But it is a step up from thewidespread attitudes these tribes havealways had to face. To me, these casesoffer some hope that one day, India’sex-criminal tribes will no longer sufferthe stigma of being so labelled; thatthey will no longer be a convenienttarget via which the police can pretendthat they are fighting crime. �

Dilip D’ Souza is a Bombay basedfreelance journalist.