Labour and Penal Control in the Criminal Tribes ‘Industrial’ Settlements in Early Twentieth Century Western India

Introduction

In his 2006 book, A Nomad Called Thief: Reflections on Adivasi Silence, Ganesh Devy describes a list of things that society had ‘given’ to adivasis over a period of sixty years: ‘Forest Acts, bonded labour, forest guards and private moneylenders, mosquitoes and malaria, naxalites and ideological war-groups … and perpetual contempt.’ ¹ Yet in a departure from the most dominant strands of Western critical theory, Devy does not suggest that these ‘gifts’ and structures are the only means through which adivasis, and in particular those otherwise marked as ‘Criminal Tribes’, can be understood. Rather, he begins to carve out a project for excavating separate knowledge systems, obscured by forms of adivasi aphasia or silence. Following Devy’s lead, this article attempts to uncover a system of everyday life, work and knowledge in the midst of archives that otherwise structure the lives of adivasi and other ‘marked’ communities in terms of penal control. It explores histories of the so-called ‘Criminal Tribes’ in western India, not principally as objects of colonial reform and punishment but rather as workers or labourers. This is accomplished by focusing on the so-called ‘industrial settlements’ or open prisons between the 1900s and 1930s, and by tracing connections to a longer-term trend in the literature that has explored mobility, rather than penal space, as a core focus. ²

Guided by the work of Michel Foucault, much of the earlier literature on the history of crime and punishment, especially that concerning ‘marked’ criminals such as the so-called ‘Criminal Tribes’, prioritized instruments of state control, the prison and legal frameworks as central to our understanding of criminality. ³ In some cases, in contexts such as India, this has had the effect of decentring the ‘criminal’ as a subject perpetually bound within colonial taxonomies. ‘Criminal Tribes’, disappearing as individual or even collective agents within formal archives, become bound to larger generalizations about criminality and penal institutions. They are reconfigured as one function of colonial governance, which characterizes every aspect of the criminal’s life, down to bodily identification and control. ⁴ Typically, the state becomes a monolithic leviathan with an apparently coherent purpose, and criminal subjects’ relation to it is ultimately determined by larger strategies of governance, even if via external agents. For Rachel Tolen, for example, the key role of the Salvation Army as one of the main agencies running Criminal Tribe settlements in the interwar period was the creation of the idea of ‘productive bodies’. Drawing on Foucault, her work links what she describes as the ‘spatiotemporal’ extension of the Salvation Army reformatories, to the changing structures of Empire itself, and discourses of confinement and reformation. ⁵

These approaches, which mostly appeared during the discipline’s cultural turn (c. 1990–2010) were not, primarily, concerned with the agency of defined criminals as labourers, or with a discussion of the actual nature of movement of labour from which some of the regimes draw. Instead, the emphasis was on how communities were ‘colonized’ by the processes of confinement, discipline and reform. Equally, work in this genre on jail industries or convict labour also frame their analyses not in terms of the political economy of colonial industrialization but in terms of the colonial ideologies of bodily regimentation, and inadequate or ‘failed’ projects in reform to produce ‘governable’ subjects. ⁶ Overall, there is a tendency, as Marilyn Booth suggests, of ‘over-reading the colonial power grid as the organisational determinant of political imaginations’. ⁷ Such approaches, although crucial for our understanding of penal institutions in contexts like colonial India, can sometimes obscure the local activism of ‘criminals’ as workers, and lead to the elision of complex, temporally and spatially contingent social relations. In this respect, we shall highlight the differences between the Bombay Presidency and other parts of India around working of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) and settlements. In Bombay, industrial settlements mostly under the control of government became the norm by the interwar period, whereas in other areas (such as Uttar Pradesh, Punjab or Madras Presidency), mixed agencies ran settlements which were not so predominantly focused on industrial concerns. ⁸

This article suggests that the reality of criminal lives, especially those groups ‘marked’ as belonging to inherently criminal communities, was a messy, complex and reactive situation, in which the structures of penal control were often shaped by an array of convicts’ labour practices and conditions both inside and outside settlements. Only a small proportion of communities notified under the CTA between 1910 and 1940 were subjected to settlement culture at some point in their lives: Out of a total estimated population of 1,175,459 according to the 1931 Census, only 2.03 per cent of the total population of criminal tribes were brought under the CTA. ⁹ Nevertheless, the nature of this small proportion, and its symbolic significance possibly made the role of non-settlement labour movements even more important, as we shall see below. The first section of this article explores the complexities that linked labour regimes within settlements to communities’ practices outside of them, in the foundational years of industrial settlements in the 1900s–10s in the crucial region of the Bombay Presidency, where experiments in industrial reformatories were most developed. Focusing on the work of OHB Starte, one of the settlement system innovators, it argues that not only the forms of labour but also the very structure and layout of settlements in Bombay Presidency were defined by external conditions, determined to a great extent by inmates’ choices. ¹⁰

The second section of the article examines how these labour complexes acquired pragmatic significance for colonial officers in the 1910s–30s faced with the inherent contradictions and failures of the CTA. It argues that the administrative work on ‘criminal communities’ created a state effect—a fiction of control—that deliberately misrepresented social realities. Arguably, as work on contemporary ‘denotified tribe’ communities has shown, the image of systematic penal control was largely a product of state projection. ¹¹ In reality, behind this projection, the ethnic basis for criminality was unstable and uncertain, and the CTA was ill-fitted to the complexities of movement and occupation. The dynamic of work and labour, as a result, was an increasingly pragmatic response to the problems of managing what appeared as collective criminality. The concept of ‘Criminal Tribe’, in theory, posited crime as a ‘habitual’ ethnic behaviour with deep cultural and occupational characteristics. But for those attempting to apply the CTA, criminality was clearly not directly occupational in a cultural sense, but rather arose from unemployment, displacement, and enforced exile or movement. Equally, and by extension, labour also became the means by which the supposed criminality of these communities might be reformed and disciplined.

As a result, as can be seen in other contexts such as Latin America, ¹² the control of criminality in late colonial India was spatially contingent, mapping onto flows of labour demand and supply, and was rooted in ideas of labour productivity. These processes shall be explored in the final section of the article, which examines the industrial settlements of western India in the mature interwar phase. In its essence, this section shall argue, the ground-level ‘working’ of the CTA was not necessarily configured by pre-ordained ideas of ethnic criminality, but in some important cases determined by the vicissitudes of market forces, the problems of labour supply and the needs of large capital projects.

Bearing this in mind, it becomes easier to begin to see how some communities defined as ‘Criminal Tribes’ were, in certain circumstances and spaces, able to make use of their labour as a discourse and practice of resistance—the third and final theme of the article. At its most direct level, as we will see below, this took the form of valorization of particular community crafts and work practices. In one specific case in the late 1930s, it led to a direct labour dispute among Criminal Tribe mill hands in the large city of Sholapur. In a more general sense, it was realized by the seasonal movement of work for some itinerant communities, whose labour control on large-scale industrial settlements could, even in this highly coercive form, be subject to workers’ movements and economic impulses. In this way, the social responses and political actions of workers, as R. S. Chandavarkar has argued, ‘often defined the options available to capital’. ¹³ They also contributed to a particular moral economy of the Criminal Tribe, which responded to the rapid changes of interwar India.

Work as Reform: OHB Starte and the Early Industrial Settlements

Many of the reformatory settlements that were set up in the Bombay Presidency ultimately ended up providing ready sources of labour for a myriad of industries in western India, most notably in textiles and cotton, and contributed to the parameters and structure of workers’ protest in the early and mid-twentieth century as will be discussed later. However, the origins of the reform settlement project did not have a clear-cut pathway, from their inception to their later synonymy with Bombay’s industrial sector. In this section, we will examine how labour—and the forms of everyday life that surrounded it—was understood by OHB Starte, who took a leading role in establishing the earliest reform settlements in the Southern Division of the Bombay Presidency. Starte was the Assistant Collector of Bijapur, deputed in 1909 for seven months by the Collector, W. C. Shepard, to settle the criminal tribes of the District. He was sanctioned ₹10,000 for the project, to be recouped after the end of his deputation. Shepard cautiously commented that the settlement project was to be costly yet worthwhile. ¹⁴

An examination of his reports reveals that Starte’s understanding of labour amongst the so-called criminal tribes he wished to settle was strongly influenced by pragmatic constraints, the perceived identities and understandings of marked communities, and local factors. The incorporation of marked communities into the workforce of the cotton industry and beyond was not clearly established in the opening decade of the 1900s, when Starte began his project. Instead, what we see is a variable situation where conceptions of labour were shaped on the ground as he went, and that these in turn helped to determine the relationships between marked communities and the labour they undertook.

At the outset, Starte aimed to end the mobility of marked communities. While two settlements for Harinshikaris were constructed during his first deputation—Hire-Magi and Mamatgeri—other Harinshikaris, as well as Chapparbands, were settled in a more disparate manner across the Bijapur district. These two communities formed his primary focus. ¹⁵ His prioritization of Chapparbands and Harinshikaris were justified by the belief that ‘a chapperband settled is a criminal already reclaimed, a Harinshikari settled {means} slow reclamation is possible’. ¹⁶ The sort of settlement Starte conducted in his first few years of deputation, therefore, took a much more disparate and ad hoc form than the reform settlements that had emerged by the 1920s–30s. One of the most limiting factors to Starte was that Bijapur had a severe shortage of available land for cultivation. Much of the available land was wasteland, left unoccupied due to its poor fertility and vulnerability to environmental factors. Even in this planning stage, Starte identified environmental and structural factors for explaining what, in theory, were culturally defined or ‘habitual’ criminal tendencies: The increased susceptibility of such lands to ‘a bad or even moderate season’, he argued, could cause a criminal to revert to their ‘normal means of livelihood’. ¹⁷

The sheer number of people whom Starte was attempting to settle compounded these concerns. The communities identified for reform consisted of populations that ran into the thousands. Further restricting Starte’s hand was the idea that marked communities could not be broken up. Harinshikaris, for instance, were noted to be ‘accustomed to act jointly’, and so attempting to split them up into smaller units posed a risk of opposition and strong resistance. Chapparbands were also settled in entire community units, and thus Starte struggled to find lands that could accommodate groups as large as, in one instance, fifteen males, eighteen females and forty children. ¹⁸ Starte’s difficulty in locating suitable land was, therefore, compounded.

As cultivation for all marked community members was not feasible, Starte was faced with the task of finding alternative means of livelihood. He consulted ‘with many persons’, finding that weaving was ‘most suited to a village industry for {Bijapur} district’. ¹⁹ Not all would, however, be allowed to take up this line of work. Chapparbands were seen as the most capable of taking up weaving, followed by Lamanis, while Harinshikaris were considered unsuitable: a labour taxonomy that tapped into colonial stereotypes of the primitive. According to Starte, Chapparbands were ‘very intelligent and would find no difficulty in learning the trade {of weaving}.’ ²⁰ This understanding arose from the nature of crime attributed to the Chapparbands. Their modus operandi was apparently to travel for up to nine months of the year around India, forging coins and tricking people into exchanging legitimate coins for the forgeries. Officials understood them, therefore, to be ‘clever workm{e}n of a misguided craft.’ ²¹ Their criminal work could thus be construed as requiring ‘intelligence’ in the act of deception itself and the process of producing forged coins. Even at this early stage, Starte’s reports suggest that Chapparband leaders exploited this colonial stereotype to bolster their own interpretation of their casual labour. Chapparbands responded to Starte’s assumptions about their inherent talents by suggesting that they would only need to be given six months of tuition on the looms before they could ‘stand upon their own feet’. ²²

In contrast, Starte viewed Harinshikaris as ‘… very simple folk and of a restless character {and so not}… capable enough to learn weaving as suggested for some of the Chapparbands’, and ‘far more uncivilized in their habits than the Chaparbands and Lamanis {and} have never up to the present taken to or been offered regular employment’. ²³ Harinshikaris were believed to be thieves, beggars and hunters, and thus their existence was not related to ‘regular employment’. In contrast, Lamanis had a history of trading via pack bullocks. Chapparbands, while not having any ‘regular employment’, carried out regular tours and engaged with money exchange. That these supposedly ethnic characteristics were deterministic fictions was clearly demonstrated by Starte’s own changing perceptions. By 1919, he admitted that while the Harinshikari had initially looked upon industrial work with distrust, they had ‘now taken to it well … I have been surprised to see the good progress which some Harinshikari boys have made {and} used to think that the latter were only really good cultivators’. ²⁴

Unlike the other two communities, then, Harinshikaris had to prove themselves worthy of Starte’s help. While Starte continued his hunt for suitable agrarian land, they were told to go to Mallapur in Hyderabad to conduct famine work, ‘and there prove that they will work steadily and honestly’, in exchange for Starte’s promises of aid. Not only was this done to test the sincerity of their desires to settle and make use of scarce land resources but it was also deemed appropriate as famine work was ‘monotonous and lowly paid’. ²⁵ Agricultural work was the only settled labour suitable to supposedly primitive communities like Harinshikaris, while the Chapparbands and Lamanis could be envisioned as part of supposedly ‘traditional’ village industrial workers. Part of the irony here was that while the Harinshikaris had been earmarked for agrarian settlement, others, such as Chapparbands, ‘evidently would prefer fields’ to the opportunities of weaving that they were presented with. ²⁶ The continual struggle to find suitable land, however, meant that Starte was committed to saving agrarian labour for those he deemed most suited to it. Thus, Harinshikaris were eventually given lands, for example 26 acres of ‘the very best black soil’ at the Mamatgeri settlement in 1909, on the premise that agrarian work provided simple, entry-level labour to a community considered ‘amenable to discipline’. ²⁷

Part of the everyday experience and agency of settlers in these early schemes involved self-settlement, construction work and new work interactions between communities deemed to be ‘Criminal Tribes’. Under Starte’s supervision, many effectively settled themselves. One such case was the settlement of Hire-Magi. As part of their settlement, Harinshikaris had been mobilized to clear 12 acres of land and had made 5,000 bricks to construct houses. ²⁸ Simultaneously, the development of new work relationships between communities marked a clear step away from the modes of work and interaction that had previously characterized such peoples as itinerant communities. Two Wadars from a neighbouring village were brought to Hire-Magi to teach wall-building techniques to Harinshikaris, who had complained that they lacked the knowledge to construct the walls themselves. ²⁹ Such physical demarcations of boundaries were thus encouraged and passed on under the supervision of members of builder castes.

Operating on a limited budget, and dependent upon the colonial state for remuneration and further funding, the mobilization of criminal tribes in settlement construction served multiple purposes. On the one hand, they provided somewhat readily available labour that worked in favour of colonial fiscal expediency. On the other hand, the construction of the settlements by criminal tribesmen provided Starte with physical evidence of early successes (albeit illusory) in reformation, particularly in the case of the Harinshikaris. The actual construction of the settlements was left to the communities being settled, who undertook construction work and demarcated the physical borders of their new neighbourhoods. The clearance of 12 acres of land and preparation of 5,000 bricks by Harinshikaris, in turn, provided evidence of reformatory success, and attested to the labour potential of this community. Such details allowed Starte to claim that settlers worked ‘regularly and laboriously’, and spoke to the colonial desire for an available base of reliable, efficient workers for the Bombay Presidency’s growing economy. ³⁰ Part of the value in mobilizing communities to settle themselves then was due to a drive for sedentarization. Starte believed they would be ‘far less likely to wish to leave land upon which they have expended a good deal of labour’, and thus this work was intended to reduce the likelihood that Harinshikaris would abandon cultivation or employ others to do it for them. ³¹

Many of the activities described above could not have taken place without forms of negotiation. As we will see next, this extended into other areas of work, and often resulted in forms of self-conscious community resistance. Starte’s reports reveal a myriad ways in which the conditions of settlement were influenced by communities themselves. Starte, as Assistant Collector, was a senior official, usually flanked by policemen when visiting settlements. Years of intermittent police and judicial harassment undoubtedly overshadowed Starte’s communications with most communities. Chapparbands had complained to Starte that ‘the Police ‘bandobast’ {was} more complete than it used to be {and} even if we say we are not a Chaparband the Police write to Bijapur and find out all about us, so it is useless to attempt to hide who we are’. ³² Yet for all the authority that Starte’s visits would have embodied, he was operating from a position of relative weakness owing to his lack of resources and coercive power. He often had to rely upon community acquiescence. As a result, internees were able to negotiate a certain degree of continuity with social structures and practices that pre-dated Starte’s reform initiatives, and influenced the ways in which they were mobilized and settled.

Contributing to this situation of limited community agency was the fact that the establishment of settlements was not a straightforward process of colonial state sanction. Reformatory settlements had to be justified, advocated for and shown to present considerable promise for further gains. This had to be done on relatively limited funds, but with a strategy for financial expansion. After Starte’s deputation in 1909, the Government of India had to be regularly convinced that his settlement efforts were worth continuing, and that government coffers were being put to good use. As a result, he had to manage relations with marked communities carefully, who on occasion asserted demands for relaxed police surveillance in return for their labour. ³³ Others who had supported Starte’s deputation and stood to gain from increased labour productivity were also active in these discussions. The Acting Commissioner of the Southern Division, C. Hudson, argued that ‘the reformation of the Chapparbands alone will be worth much more’ than the cost of Starte’s proposed financial schemes to continue and expand his reform settlements. ³⁴ Itinerant peoples thus became commoditized in discussions between colonial officials.

Starte’s dependence on headmen as vital intermediaries between himself and the wider population of marked communities also allowed the social structures surrounding itinerant groups to shape settlement policy and infrastructure. This can be seen in how a Harinshikari headman at Hire-Magi managed to secure free stones from a nearby old fortification in order to ‘build a real house’. This was in contrast with the homes of other Harinshikaris, who were busy constructing ‘low wall huts with thatched roofs (like the Lamanis’ huts)’. ³⁵ Headmen could thus symbolize and manifest their authority in physical markers, reproducing existing community hierarchies. While bricks had been prepared for housing construction, it is notable that the headman required materially different building resources. Originally, the headman had identified an old wall that he wanted to extract stones from, however, it ‘turned out to be the property of a matt’. Starte’s recognition of headmen was justified as a means of preventing criminal behaviour, or heading off tensions between Harinshikaris and surrounding village populations. This was encouraged by ideologies of reform held by colonial officials. Settling and ‘reforming’ Harinshikaris was, therefore, tied up with a larger reading of the local political economy, and remedying community reputations as ‘a constant nuisance and irritation to the cultivators.’ ³⁶

The authority of headmen, and the social and political structures they maintained, also informed discussions over labour and settlement. When Starte had suggested to the Chapparbands that they take up weaving, he allowed an extensive discussion among them. In some respects, then, Starte’s initiatives served to reinforce existing community hierarchies. Chapparbands held a large meeting in the presence of their headmen, involving members from a multitude of tandas. It was decided that each home should discuss the opportunity for weaving, then relay their opinions to headmen and other community representatives, who in turn corresponded with Starte. ³⁷ Luckily for Starte, this meeting went in his favour and many agreed to take up weaving.

Such negotiations reveal that even in this area of extraordinary penal control, colonial power still depended on forms of accommodation with Chapparband community organizations. The decision to adopt weaving seemed to lie almost entirely in the hands of the Chapparbands, with headmen playing a central role between the wider Chapparband communities and colonial authorities. Even then, however, there was an acknowledgement of the limits of the power of headmen. They had told Starte that while they were willing to hold responsibility for people belonging to their specific geri (group under a headman, literally meaning ‘lane’), they could not be bound to the conduct of other geri units. ³⁸ Pressure from the colonial state, and the ever-present spectre of police power, had clearly failed to dissolve the autonomy of the different geri groups, which directly influenced the ways in which Chapparbands were to be settled, and the course of negotiations over the nature of work to be undertaken by them.

Thus, while the attempt to settle Chapparbands and others was premised on the ethnographic assumptions of pre-existing hierarchies, the very attempts at control revealed multiple examples of resistance. By attempting to privilege the autonomy of community structures, Starte was also faced with localized subversion of labour regimes. Whether or not this was conscious resistance to the state in a wider sense is difficult to ascertain from the records for this period, but the forms of action show continuity with a later phase (see below) in which petitioning to government became a specific strategy. Whatever control the police were supposed to exert upon Chapparbands was clearly an illusion to Starte, as he remarked cynically that the daily register to monitor Chapparbands was ‘quite a farce {…} they openly tell me they are going on tour (feri) in a month or two’s time, and already more than a half have set out’. ³⁹ In this sense, labour regimes did not necessarily disrupt or change established and everyday patterns of community work and movement. Moreover, the legal foundations of the register were doubtful, as Starte confirmed in the case of Lamanis. The measures in place were clearly ineffective, and their questionable foundations gave Starte little scope for applying a more rigid application of them.

As previously mentioned, marked communities wanted to stay together in their existing groups rather than be broken up. ⁴⁰ Congregations of Harinshikaris were, however, perceived as threatening by state authorities, and they only agreed to be dispersed and settled further apart after tense discussion. ⁴¹ Starte was not the only one with such issues, as in the neighbouring Dharwar district, attempts to settle Harinshikaris on the waste lands in the Yeri (a ‘black soil’ area) had failed due to opposition from the community: ‘there is no waste land {…} which they fancy’. ⁴² In other instances, Harinshikaris wanted to stay where they were. Starte had tried to halt works on uncultivatable lands, but the Harinshikari occupants continued to clear it and request stone for building. ⁴³ Starte sometimes had no means to effectively interfere with the everyday practices of marked communities around community rites of passage. Two Chapparband boys had been identified by Starte as ‘suitable for the giving of help by further education’, however they had ‘gone away for the marriage of one of them’. ⁴⁴ The boys had promised to return, and that is where the possibility of intervention ended.

A more striking case of resistance arose from Chapparbands’ use of the resources provided by the colonial state. Starte had noted an earlier attempt by Bijapur authorities to settle Chapparbands in 1904, which proved to be a near-complete failure. Lands and tagai bullocks given to Chapparbands were rented out to tenants, usually on kor-lawani (the tenant splits the produce 50–50 with the owner). Often the bullocks were absent altogether from the fields, and while their Chapparband owners reported that they had died, colonial officials were certain that the bullocks had simply been taken with Chapparbands on their nine-month long tours of India as pack animals or to be sold. ⁴⁵ Such events had encouraged Starte’s belief that if such practices were to end, the centrality of the headman and their influence was key.

Others did not directly resist settlement work, but used their position as settlers to negotiate benefits within the framework of British-led reform efforts. Chapparbands were able to approach Starte’s staff and request land, stating that they had petitioned for the previous two years with no luck. ⁴⁶ Starte’s reform efforts created an effective space for appeals, and the relationship required to leverage a degree of agency over the actions of local governments, as this group promised not to go on tour in exchange for Starte’s services in inquiring and securing land for them. Others used the framework of reform to bargain for their lands to become inheritable. Such cases involved groups that had actually taken to personally working the land they had been given, inquiring as to whether their sons would inherit the lands upon their death. Such negotiations formed a peculiar quid pro quo between settlers and colonial authorities engaged in reform. They were able to use their pre-settlement practices and recognized forms of land inheritance as bargaining chips. In exchange, Starte was given the opportunity to claim success in his efforts and gain momentum for his own reform cause, arguing that these examples expressed ‘an increasing desire to settle down’. ⁴⁷

The Working and the Un-working of the CTA After the First World War

In parts of Bombay Presidency during the 1910s, then, it was clear that forms of ethnographic definition and penal control of communities were shaped by considerations of work and labour. In this section, we will explore how this dovetailed more generally with the varied taxonomies of the local state in the two decades that followed, as the system of industrial settlements matured. It was perhaps ironic that from the end of the First World War, the Government of Bombay began to publish an annual administrative report on the ‘Working of the Criminal Tribes Act’, since to a great extent the implementation of the Act is better understood as a process of unworkability. There were two broad factors in failure of the CTA. First, there was the problem of aggregated ethnographic knowledge, which was constantly unravelled or even negated by movement and spatial variation among populations of communities notified under the CTA. Further, there were difficulties inherent in its administration by local officers and police, who were rarely distanced from the social relationships of notified groups, and therefore sometimes deliberately subverted the provisions of the Act. As we will see in the final section of this article, these processes of unworkability created a context of flexibility in the implementation of the CTA that, by the interwar period, allowed the labour requirements of large-scale enterprises and public capital projects to shape the governance, control and resistance of erstwhile ‘Criminal Tribes’.

One of the large-scale problems in implementing the CTA was the existence of borders between British India and Indian States, which may or may not have operated a comparable system of control. In the CTAs of Hyderabad and Mysore states, for example, provisions had been made for dealing with Criminal Tribe members belonging to British provinces or other Indian states. On the other hand, despite the elaborate nature of the CTA’s supposed implementation, the reverse was not true: There was no corresponding provision in the CTA of 1924 to account for communities moving from States. A Bombay police administration report from the late 1920s suggested therefore that ‘provision should be made in the CTA to prevent members of Criminal Tribes of Indian States coming into British India without special passes and for deporting such members to their homes if they are found in British India without the required passes.’ ⁴⁸ Administering such a proposal, however, would have been practically impossible.

The spatial problem and that of aggregation created problems at more local levels too. The Report of 1919 noted that,

If the population of any district were divided into 3 classes, 20 per cent in Class A being the better classes, 40 per cent in class B the middle classes, and 40 per cent in class C the lower classes, it would be found that by far the greatest proportion of crime against property was committed by class C, but no one would propose on that account to notify the depressed 40 per cent as a criminal tribe. ⁴⁹

In a more specific sense, in the early 1920s some communities were misrepresented by forms of ethnographic aggregation across different districts. For example, the Deputy Superintendent of Police of Satara noted that there were 726 members of Kaikadi tribe in Satara district but only one person had been convicted. It was, therefore, not clear why Kaikadis had been notified under Section 3 of the CTA. ‘That many Kaikadis of other districts have criminal tendencies is true, but this cannot be said of the Satara Kaikadis’. Therefore in Satara, their registration, originally in 1912, twelve years before the objection was noticed, was cancelled. ⁵⁰

The CTA was also a casualty of the changeability of the Indian state. Ambivalence and sometimes opposition to the Act existed at all levels of policing and administration. The Inspector General (IG) of police in Bombay expressed reservations from the perspective of his own officers: ‘the degree of activity displayed in different districts in the administration of the Act has depended largely on the interest taken by the District SP and the extent to which he has interested his District Magistrate in the matter’ he wrote in 1925. He further stated that ‘different policies and different methods have been evolved in dealing with the same tribe in different districts and much confusion and waste of energy appears to me to have taken place.’ He cited the overlap of the notification of a gang of Javeris who had already been notified in a different part of the province. There had been no attempt to track travelling groups, and by a bizarre administrative oversight, often communities could ‘avoid’ registration by going into jail. As a solution, the IG suggested that the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) should take ‘a comprehensive grasp’ of the work, and that there should be a proper DSP attached to the CID for the specific purpose of the CTA. ⁵¹

The complications of administration were even more varied and significantly more easily subverted at local levels of governance. One of the principal difficulties in the working of the Act was that it had to be implemented through the Patels of the villages, most of whom were Patidars. In the case of one large group of communities differentially notified under the CTA—the Dharalas—this created a shadow structure of power that was replicated in other contexts. Between the Patidars and Dharalas there was, according to one reporter, ‘a constant tug of war’:

The Act is regarded more as a means of getting the Dharalas under their control, and it leads to many abuses. The officers enquiring about bad characters have naturally to depend largely on the information they receive from the patels and their friends and in many cases the latter simply scheme to put a man on the hazri in order to satisfy some private grudge … and in many cases the threat of the Act is employed in order to put pressure on the Dharalas so as to get the better of him in some dispute, or even to make him perform petty tasks for the benefit of the Patel or his friends. ⁵²

This view was amply supported by Ravishankar Vyas, who had worked among Dharalas and Waghris in Kaira for twenty years and who gave evidence in 1938–9 to the then Congress-driven Bombay government enquiry into the CTA. His evidence also pointed to the ways in which everyday social interactions could change and determine the operation of the CTA on the ground—in this case, through payments of small bribes or cooperation in illegal activity. Vyas claimed:

If a police patil wants people to bring fodder for cattle he registers a few young Dharalas who would become his servants; if some Dharala goes about village with a hukah in his hand, it is regarded as an impertinence and an insult to the patil who gets him registered.

He continued:

What regularly happens is that if a man is a regular criminal, he manages to square the patel who keeps the register unwritten for 3–4 days. If the man is arrested somewhere else, he marks him absent. On coming back, if he shares the spoils with the patel he is marked present.

The testimony of Vyas further suggested that such everyday arrangements were not necessarily the domain of men within communities—that negotiations could be led by women. Sometimes ‘a tribesman or woman might bribe a police officer or patel … and thus {has} to pay ₹15 to ₹20 per annum’ to avoid the hazri. ‘The result is that the real criminal or substantive man always escapes while the innocent man has to give hazri and work for a patel.’ However, it is striking that the typical ‘Criminal Tribe’ representative was typically considered to be male, and that despite detailed ethnographic work on the specific criminal activities of women in texts such as the writings of Gunthorpe, ⁵³ traditional patriarchies were usually the official point of reference. In his overall conclusion, Vyas argued that the more rigorous the system, the more opportunities there were for fraud and evasion. ⁵⁴ Penal cultures were therefore driven as much by social structures outside formal state regimes, as by institutions and legal instruments, and communities reacted or negotiated accordingly.

Although the situation was pronounced in the case of Dharalas, the problems of local administrative corruption extended elsewhere. In 1925, the DSP of Satara suggested that there should also be an automatic system of end of registration, as this would tend to stop the temptation of corruption among subordinate officers. The ‘successful and fair working of the system’ depended on the village patels, upon whom the roll-calls and reporting of absences fell:

Village officers have so frequently been the subject of criticism in reports regarding the working of the Criminal Tribes Act that it is a question whether any system will work unless they are clearly impressed with the importance of the duties entrusted to them and their liability to be severely dealt with, if they are found making false reports either in favour of, or against, a registered tribesman. ⁵⁵

Similarly, P. V. Domingo, a retired Deputy Collector noted during the 1939 enquiry that

village headmen never reported absences of registrees forthwith. Generally no notice was taken until the Police came to visit the village when blanks in registers were filled. Criminal Tribes men who refuse to work for the Patil are in danger of being marked absent and prosecuted

—that is, if they refused to do personal service. ⁵⁶

It became clear by the end of the 1920s, that even recorded crime rates did not match state-wise populations of so-called Criminal Tribes. Bombay Presidency was quite low down the list of provinces in crime—in 8th position in 1928 in terms of crimes per 1,000 population, with Burma as the highest, then the Central Provinces, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, North-West Provinces, Assam, Bengal, then Bombay, followed by Bihar and Orissa, and Madras. ⁵⁷ Yet Bombay province had the second highest proportion of ‘Criminal Tribes’ within its population, with a total of nearly 624,000 (in 1947), in a population of around 26 million in 1931 when we have the last reliable colonial-era figures. ⁵⁸ There was no statistical evidence, thus, that increases in crime overall in any particular state or even region were actually attributable to Criminal Tribes, which depended largely on anecdotal official wisdom.

It was this erosion of the CTA as an effective instrument of control that brings us back to the main points of our argument: rather than ethnography becoming the ultimate determinant of penal policy and policing, occupation and labour gradually gained traction as an official (and non-official) rationale for how the CTA might be worked. In its recommendations concerning the registration of communities under the Act, a conference of police officers in 1935 in Bombay suggested, for example, that ‘the Local Government shall consider… whether the criminal tribe, part or member, follows any lawful occupation, and whether such occupation is a real occupation or merely a pretence for the purpose of facilitating the commission of crimes’. ⁵⁹ In beginning to develop this wider occupational basis for criminality around ideas of labour and work, these police officers also felt that movement to industrial towns could provide a ‘cover’ for criminal activities. ⁶⁰ As we will see in the next section, by the 1920s and 1930s, considerations of the broader political economy of labour began to clearly shape both ethnographic knowledge and the work of ‘Criminal Tribe’ settlements in a very direct way.

Work and Convict Labour Protest in Interwar Western India

One of the key sources of uncertainty surrounding the ethnic basis for criminality, inherent in the working of the CTA, related to the ambiguities generated by movement and occupation. The dynamic of work and labour became another means for officers to identify what they perceived as collective criminality. Labour conditions and work moulded practices of penal control too, especially, as this final section will show, in the interwar period, when industrial settlements grew in size, number, and diversified in function. As historians working on both the prison space and the individual body of putative criminals have argued, the colonial archive typically presents the Criminal Tribes as figures appearing either via punishment, or through ‘work’ as reform and discipline. This axiom is easily located with a cursory glance at any formal state archive for western India. From 1919, for instance, settlement reports discussed ‘moral and economic development’ and how ‘in these settlements nearly ten thousand human beings … are being fitted to take their place as useful citizens’. ⁶¹ The very concept of ‘work’ could determine forms of punishment: In the Bijapur settlement proposed in 1919, Starte suggested that ‘the extreme punishment for refusal to work or for laziness would be by procedure against the person under section 22 of the Criminal Tribes Act when he could be sent to jail for any period up to six months.’ ⁶²

By the interwar period, however, particularly the mid-1920s, by which time industrial settlements had taken root, ⁶³ it was not the question of reform or punishment that determined structures of work, but rather the other way around. The establishment of a new settlement at Dandeli in 1919 in the Kanara district, for example, supplied forest labour for quite strategic purposes. With the opening of the Alnavar–Dandeli railway for exploitation of the Kanara forests, Dandeli had become the centre of large forest operations for which there was no supply of labour available. The proposer of the scheme suggested that ‘if the men could be got, the Forest Revenue would increase permanently.’ The selection of communities was less about criminality and more related to experience and aptitude: The tribes selected were to be from the Dharwar district—Berads, Lamanis, and Kaikadis and officers were advised ‘to select families used to a forest life.’ ⁶⁴ The requirements of specific labour supply on a large scale was even better illustrated in newly formed capital projects such as Nira. Established in 1924, and initially planned for completion in early 1927, the Nira Projects settlement involved excavating a mile of canal at Chik Mohad, typically by a work force of around 400–500 men and women. The project quickly became the pragmatic end rather than the means of Criminal Tribe control and reform, often shaping administrative decisions: good conduct could determine movement to or away from a large capital works project. ⁶⁵ Starte and other administrators found construction work ‘very useful’ for managing ‘surplus work’, ⁶⁶ and suggested, for example, that workers might be moved between Nira and one of the other minor irrigation schemes. ⁶⁷

Arguably, many of the open prisons or settlements could not have existed without this labour, in a system already half sub-contracted to organizations such as the Maratha Mission and the Salvation Army. Industrial labour, especially mill work, was at crucial junctures a means of supporting the settlements’ financial needs—the Sholapur settlement for example in 1918–9 received a capitation grant which amounted to 12 annas per mensem for each person from the settlement working in the mills, so long as the worker was ‘not absent for more than 4 working days in the month’. Given that the size of the Sholapur settlement population in that year stood at 3,200, this was a significant arrangement. ⁶⁸ Reports on work undertaken for the Public Works Department were written in terms of measurable financial and administrative benefits, and also concerning the everyday work patterns of communities who had come to specialize in certain forms of labour. Thus, Bhats of Bijapur, the 1919 report on the Criminal Tribe Act suggested, had made ‘a speciality of work of cutting and destroying prickly pear, finding regular employment doing this difficult and unpopular work.’ The same report noted that the settlers at Shiroli had cut 11 lakhs pounds of grass for famine operations and 1.5 lakh cubic feet of fuel wood for the railways. ⁶⁹

By the late 1920s, most of the new innovations in settlements revolved around large-scale industrial projects. The fate of internees, again, was determined to a great extent by the requirements of labour: In 1926, officials realized that the work at Nira might be completed in a year and there was need to find more work. Proposals were made for a new settlement that would provide about 200 families with work in the construction of a tank at Pimpalgaon Kunjira, near Sangamner in the Ahmednagar district. This included communities from geographically wide-ranging areas: Hurs from Sind; Ramoshis and Mangs from Satara; Mang Garudis, Bhamptas, Rajput Bhamptas, Harinshikaris from Bombay and Ahmednagar and some from Bijapur. ⁷⁰ The list of ‘tribesmen/women’ awaiting work, Starte stated, was long, and they depended on the establishment of work. ⁷¹ In fact, the entire edifice of ‘Criminal Tribe’ confinement was subject to labour requirements. Starte admitted:

I fear the district authorities would rightly complain if I discharged the above persons prematurely. Most of them are newcomers to the settlement work. I have already cut down my budgets and have not taken any new persons into the settlements for 6 months, as the supply of work has become less. ⁷²

By 1932, internees from Nira and new arrivals were being moved to Jalgaon and Barsi, as well as a match factory at Ambernath, and a railway workshop at Dohad, where reports pointed out that ‘Berads’ were doing coupe cutting. ⁷³

There was also increasing discussion of the spatial organization of work: The gravity of settlement work had moved northwards by the 1930s, and discussions revolved around urgent need for work in particular areas. Settlements in the South of the Presidency had decreased in number with the closure of Indi, Kerur, Gokak Falls and Dandeli, but new sources of employment for a potential supply of labour ‘needed to be tapped’. The creation of a settlement at Mundwa near Poona was proposed, for which the non-recurring costs were to be financed from the profits of the Nira Project settlement and Khanapur settlement. Other sources of employment included the Deccan Paper Mills, the sugar cane fields and quarry work in Poona. ⁷⁴

Because of these spatial calculations, settlements also worked as a means of tracing the normal labour migration of communities, and further, the latter determined labour patterns regarding these projects. In this respect, as in the first decade of the settlements, everyday work practices of communities played a part in the formulation of labour regimes. In 1918–9, Berads in the Belgaum area were brought as entire families to the Khanapur settlement—this was possible due to migration during the grass cutting season, with some staying on to cut wood once it was over. These families, administrators realized, had ‘villages to go back to’, and even land in some cases, and they were permitted to return ‘on good behaviour’. ⁷⁵ In other words, the labour regime in this case, and many others, worked in relation to existing patterns of seasonal work migration by labouring communities. The same report noted that

it seems to me that the great root evil which causes the crime amongst the Berads and amongst tribes similar to them is that they have too much leisure in their villages. They work during the cultivating season but they have not sufficient initiative to seek out and perform other work during the off-season. The result is that they have not sufficient to eat. ⁷⁶

In a similar vein, official commentaries on Lamanis in Bombay Presidency stressed the relationship between their longer-term economic displacement and work practices, and contemporary industrial employment. The total population of Lamanis in the province was 17,573, of which only 1,220 or just under 7 per cent were registered under the CTA. ⁷⁷ The District Magistrate of Bijapur concluded that it would be a mistake to ‘lump together all Lamanis of all talukas without distinction as criminals and treat them accordingly’. For example, in Indi, fewer than 0.5 per cent had been convicted, whereas in Muddebihal, the figure was 10 per cent, and in Hungund 6 per cent. Both talukas were, he stated, ‘notorious for the distillation of illegal liquor’, in which the Lamanis were supposedly proficient. He argued that since there was not enough money to move them all, it would be pointless to move them all indiscriminately. The problem of the Lamanis, officials noted, was at its core economic. They had originally been carriers of goods, transported via bullock cart, but with the opening of roads and railways, their occupation was lost. Therefore, the solution was to move them to areas where labour was needed, limiting the removal of tandas (small scale tribal settlements) to ‘the few bad ones’. ⁷⁸

The work of Criminal Tribes on capital projects and in mills, then, was connected in important ways to the wider political economy of labour supply, and in some cases it exaggerated changes in patterns of local power and authority among communities marked as ‘Criminal Tribes’, as is suggested in the examples of Lamani movement and removal of tandas above. Above all, the movement of Criminal Tribes into urban industrial work placed them within new hierarchies with existing labouring communities. In some cases, for example, the ‘free’ labour movement of tribal groups was seen as a threat to local urban working populations. In 1935, for example, the Deputy IG of Police Bombay stated at a conference that

there is also for consideration the invasion of our labour markets by such tribesmen to the loss of our own working population. I am thinking of the case of the Pasis and Bhars of the United Provinces who have come in numbers into Bombay City and the suburbs. ⁷⁹

They were, he said, under the CTA in their home districts of UP, and therefore a similar situation should apply in the Bombay province too.

The larger political economy of labour, thus, and the structural or environmental conditions changing it, played a powerful role in shaping the industrial organization of erstwhile ‘Criminal Tribes’. The bad rains and famine conditions of 1924 were reported to have affected the Bijapur and Gadag settlements, since rural migrants moved into cities for work, ⁸⁰ and employment was mapped onto phases of economic depression in the early 1930s. During the same period, officers noted how certain communities who were without a permanent village base or regular work, also exercised an element of agency, and ‘chose to go to free colonies’. ⁸¹ Reports mapped employment availability to the incidence of crime as well in this spatial calculation. Thus, officials commenting on the working of the CTA concluded that in 1919, the immediate post-war rise in prices had led to increases in petty crime. ⁸² As well as forcible movement, some of the forestry settlements were designed to ‘attract settlers’ in this period, such as a Belgaum settlement plan in 1919, seeking to ‘get long-term prisoners who have behaved well and who can bring their families’. ⁸³ As in the immediate post-Great War period, by the Second War again, larger economic conditions shaped the fate and activities of settlements. In 1940, the poor employment situation and fall in wages had generated difficult conditions in settlements, with some being forced to close. ⁸⁴

From the mid-1930s onward, archival material begins to show evidence of more forceful demands and petitions from workers including some instances of industrial action. Extensive and systematic petitioning of the Bombay government also occurred, leading up to the Sholapur industrial action of 1938, as evidenced by both a Congress enquiry and one of our interviewees. ⁸⁵ In 1935, with the Nira project coming to an end, officials expressed concerns about unrest. Consequently, the PWD provided work in field drainage work at the Akluj sugar factory. In the same year, there was a strike at Ambernath match factory and it was closed for several months. ⁸⁶ In a more general sense, there were protests about movement and change of neighbourhood: The petition of the Lamanis of Akeri, for example, stated their protest against the removal of their tanda—a demand that was rejected, suggesting that social unevenness influences success in negotiation. ⁸⁷

On 26 January 1938, a large gathering of inmates of Bombay Presidency’s largest CT settlement—Sholapur—joined workers from across the city, including other mill hands and beedi workers, at the Cattle Bazar. The speakers at the meeting spoke about the strikes and protests taking place in large cities elsewhere—Patna, Kanpur and Lahore. In this meeting, and others that followed, police reported that leaders from the settlement compared their condition to the plight of political prisoners. The manager of the Settlement, referred to in the protest rhetoric as ‘Hieb Sahib’, the local epitome of the colonial state, reported how speakers ‘set up as patriotic heroes these persons who have the same sort of offences or worse—as those for which settlers were punished.’ Those showing ‘enthusiasm’ for the speeches were marked out to the police. From February 1938 onward, around 300 settlement workers struck work. Following their arrests, one of the CT leaders, Ratan Kallu Pardhi, told police that when the meeting broke up, none of the internees expected to experience a lathi-charge under a Congress government. ⁸⁸ Those who remembered the period following the strike suggested that the emergence of a new CT leadership during this strike created space for a new generation of younger, urban leaders to connect to labour politics, disturbing some of the existing patterns of social hierarchies among settlers. ⁸⁹

This industrial action, perhaps the most vociferous of this period in connection to CT settlements, took place with the collaboration of the Red Flag Union. ⁹⁰ The scale of the strike, which was started and in some instances led by settlers, was such that it appeared as a major theme in the annual administration report on the working of the CTA, as well as the Bombay Congress Government’s own Report of the Criminal Tribes Act Committee of 1939, which was chaired by K. M. Munshi. Despite the arrest of Red Flag leaders, 300 settlers still struck work, leading to the transfer of ringleaders and prosecution of about ten others. ⁹¹ As we have argued elsewhere, alongside the right to strike itself, the Sholapur settlement mill strikers asserted a series of other demands, including demands to the Congress Commission around the CTA itself. ⁹² These were forwarded to the government by settlement organizations, which are likely to have been related to those identified as the ‘settlement sewa sangh’ by a surviving interviewee. ⁹³ This organization did not clearly develop out of the existing hierarchies of community headmen, but rather the figures who had distinguished themselves in the strike action itself, and particularly in resistance to police repression around the strike.

A few years later, Sholapur settlers were also involved, according to interviewees, in Congress-led protests around Quit India. ⁹⁴ But what was particularly striking about the 1938 strikes in the context of the larger context of industrial employment, was the intense colonial paranoia about the larger-scale possibilities of strike action. H T Lambrick reported on the events that ‘… the whole proceeding, of holding up Lenin to the Criminal Tribes as a model to follow, is so patently pregnant with danger that any comments are superfluous.’ ⁹⁵ Clearly, Sholapur settlers had a history of involvement or at least interest in industrial action, with large numbers attending a labour meeting just before the strikes on 23 January on ‘Lenin Day’. On this occasion, one speaker suggested a longer-term engagement in industrial action, pointing out that

in the strike of 1931 and 1934, the Police used to convey you in lorries and used to tell you that you had not right of strike and that if any one would not attend the mill, would be punished for 6 months. Now the 2000 settlers who are to be released, will be free and shall take the lead in any future strikes. ⁹⁶

The right to strike then, shaped notions of CT liberation in a larger sense. Throughout 1938 in Sholapur, specifically, strikes were configured as justice and entitlement—cutting across community but nevertheless also employing it within settlement life. This activity was internally organized rather than necessarily linked to (weak) unions, and couched in the language of custom and justice: strikers talked about their rights as putative citizens and political agents. A few years later, Sholapur settlers transformed this activism to other channels according to interviewees, by employment in the 1942 Quit India protests. ⁹⁷

Most importantly, the Sholapur settlement workers mobilized within the context of the settlement itself. Key leaders—Rhising Khanda Bhat, Garhya Shabhu Bhat, Mahadu Gurrapa Bhat and Tipa Krishna Kaikadi—were named by police as organizers in the settlement. The transfer of three other ‘ringleaders’ in November 1937 had led to protests within the settlement, and crucially this group was drawn from the same figures who had organized a reception committee for Munshi. Police reports on the composition of these leadership clusters pointed to the fact that women as well as men were among their ranks. Protesters argued that the arrests were a deliberate attempt to forestall the work of the reception committee. One of our interviewees, Bhimrao Jadav described this committee as the ‘Settlement Sewa Sangh’—associational in its culture—and drawing on the traditional skills and crafts of communities themselves. ⁹⁸

Conclusion

At the point of their inception in 1909, the ‘Criminal Tribe’ settlements were designed to be at the pinnacle of the CTA’s reformatory structure. In reality, they were shaped by pragmatism and negotiation in internment policy, labour practices, and funding. From the beginning, the experiments in CT settlement set up by OHB Starte were shaped by the everyday practices, work and movement of communities themselves. Rather than being informed by ethnographic knowledge, CT labour regimes could be highly changeable and flexible. Most importantly, local governments building settlements were forced to take into account social hierarchies around existing community organizations by coming to terms with headmen and caste panchayats. This is not to argue that the settlements were not, as Tolen and others argue, part of a larger system of coercive convict labour, in which the rights of internees and their families were effectively suspended under the extreme penal provisions of the CTA. However, it does suggest that labour structures and practices shaped the early formation of the settlement regime.

By the 1920s, local governments fully acknowledged that the fate of so-called ‘Criminal Tribes’ could be arbitrarily decided by local officers working at the behest of dominant groups in any particular district. This admission—that the CTA was constantly rendered unworkable—supports the possibility that the control of itinerant communities might be considered in terms of the pragmatic questions of labour supply. As a result, OHB Starte’s initiatives to increase and extend work on large-scale industrial concerns were given free rein by Bombay Province governments, and formed part of wider discussions about the effects of communities on other labouring communities in India’s rapidly growing cities. It was these concerns about labour, the political economy of work and seasonal migration, which increasingly determined the lived realities of those subject to the CTA.

By extension, political resistance in the settlements also revolved around work. Officialdom was surprised by industrial action, among apparently disorganized CT communities. But as the Congress government’s own committee report on the CTA stressed—the single most important manifestations of community politics took place during the mill strikes of 1938 in Sholapur. As Raj Chandavarkar showed for Bombay and Kamat for Sholapur, the weakness of Unions did not prevent worker mobilization. ⁹⁹ And as in Bombay, in the Sholapur settlement, the conditions of the worker neighbourhood shaped the cultures of combination and sustained the strikes. We might see this as a reclaiming of cultural space, akin to what Gooptu describes for UP, as CTs signalling a kind of virtuous deprivation and exclusion. ¹⁰⁰ The rhetoric of the strike drew on the deep institutionalization and exclusion of CTs as members of the workforce, and repeal of the CTA was constantly woven into the usual workers’ demands. These cultures, in turn, shaped the longer-term historical associations that underpinned the post-colonial CT movements for political resistance and mobilization.

Finally, this happened at a pivotal historical moment in the late 1930s, when CT labour activism became a means of signalling wider forms of dissatisfaction against the state. This was refracted, on the one hand, into the Settlement mana- gement, and on the other, into the Bombay Congress government. The settlement became, in miniature, the state, just as Home minister K M Munshi was the focus for appeal and deputation. The strikes at this time, therefore, were not just a statement about work, but also about how CTs positioned themselves in relation to the state, and about the role of CTs in the national project.