Criminalizing Nomadic Femininity: Colonial Trail of the Kathua Rape–Murder

Kennedy in the Times of Kathua

The concerns of this article have their origins in a chance encounter with Michael Kennedy in the far corner of a library in the University of Delhi. A treatise scripted by this colonial policeman was lying in a disorganized glass cabinet, one that was labelled as ‘Rare Books’ for reasons unknown to me. Yet, it was hard to overlook the account after prying into the cabinet, mostly for the manner in which the two words, ‘Criminal Classes’, were richly embossed to the exclusion of all else on its cherry red jacket. I was myself surprised at how the gloss had survived in all these years, considering the account had been issued forth in early 1908. At the time of flipping through this account in the summer of 2014, I did not suffer the slightest premonition of how the several cues spread over its pages—of nomads, women and children—would aggregate with brute force at Kathua in the time to come.

When the book is revisited in light of the recent rape–murder of a Bakarwal girl in Kathua, we are made to take note of the intense concentration of a communal spirit in a quaint pocket of North India, but not without the significant refractions of colonial power. As some of us might already know, the township of Kathua lies at the foothills of the Himalayas in Jammu, comprising a larger political regime where India and Pakistan still shred over the question of Kashmir. Here, the Muslim Bakarwals are an ethnic minority of livestock herders. ¹ They are also nomadic/semi-nomadic, thereby challenging troubled borderlines in other ways. When the heinous rape and murder of a Bakarwal girl was reported in early 2018 from such whereabouts, it placed the secular underpinnings of the Indian state, yet again, under a cloud. In the midst of such pressing concerns a reading of Kennedy might appear like a digression, even a convenient luxury, till we start to take simultaneous note of the secular office of this colonial policeman, and how it continues to play out in a communal present.

In challenging the convenient binaries of secular-communal in this way, I do not lay claim to any novelty of approach. Scholarly explorations with regard to the debates on child marriage in colonial India have gone to reveal how colonial modernists and Hindu traditionalists frequently found themselves on the same page. In Tanika Sarkar’s (1993, p. 1875) reading of the issue, both parties, despite outer differences, collectively boiled concerns over child marriage down to the quest for a ‘biological age’. This age was intended to convey a universally accepted threshold by which the female body was no more than ‘ready to accept sexual penetration without serious harm’. The question of consent was completely waylaid and a patriarchal space for marital rape was generated with lasting effects in existing legislation. Taking a cue from such historical reasoning, this article tries to underscore how the present rape–murder, which is more easily attributable to a libidinal brand of Hindu nationalism, is not without certain ‘official’ procedures of the modern secular state with deep roots in our colonial experience.

Such procedures, needless to state, are historically linked to the stigmatization of nomadic femininity in the colony. The task of retrieving such strands has been rendered difficult, and therefore equally necessary, for the manner in which the media has practically invisiblized the nomadic dimensions of Bakarwal lifeworlds in the last year or so. In response, the present article first delineates the ongoing obliteration of nomadic realities at the hands of investigative journalism and media reporting, and then reads Kennedy progressively against this erasure. Such a reading is attempted through existing scholastic gaps, such as the absence of the nomad in the broader discussions between women and nationalism. For instance, Ramaswamy’s (2010) erudite exploration of ‘patriotic cartography’ in more recent times manages to draw our attention to the ubiquity of a certain type of image that finds a Hindu goddess pictographically embedded on an outlined map of India. Ramaswamy makes a persuasive case for how this imagery turns the nation into a corporeal entity, a ‘motherland’ worth dying, if not killing, for. But the making of a Hinduized nation-space in such ways, as analyzed by Ramaswamy, fails to account for how a nomadic woman might additionally disturb geographical contexts hallowed through a static goddess. In aspiring to situate colonialist constructions of nomadic femininity within the ambit of Hindu nationalism, it is important to begin with what, after all, transpired at Kathua in early 2018.

Nomads: Lost in Translation

The nomadic Bakarwals had set base in the village limits of Rasana, Kathua, towards the end of 2017. The migratory route of the Bakarwals cuts through some of the verdant pastures in such reaches. On 10 January 2018, however, a young girl of 8 years of age went missing from the makeshift campsite of the Bakarwals. The girl’s father filed a complaint on the subsequent day. Failure to find the girl found concerns growing into justifiable outrage. Search operations were stepped up. The girl’s body was eventually discovered a week later by a search party on 17 January in a nearby forest. Signs of brutality were in full evidence right from the start. As the investigation proceeded it started to become increasingly clear that the Bakarwal girl had not gone missing but had been abducted. A post-mortem report of September 2018 confirmed the girl had been gang raped. She had also been sedated in order to ‘render her incapacitated’ for the purpose of raping. ² The same report also confirmed that her head had been lethally struck with a rock in the final moments before her body was disposed in the jungle.

It was subsequently discovered that a secluded temple shrine called Devisthan had served as the site of rape. The girl had been held hostage here for four long days. The more proactive half of the police, acting under media pressure and the full glare of civil society, eventually arrested the custodian of Devisthan, Sanji Ram. They also took his son and nephew in for questioning. Sanji Ram, it came to be learnt, was also an active member of a communally charged outfit in Kathua called the Hindu Ekta Manch. Should there be any surprise, then, that in the pending time select Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers mobilized Hindu populations in defence of Sanji Ram and his accomplices. ³ This transpired through the early part of April 2018. This ugly show of Hindutva strength was matched with underhanded efforts from within the police department to destroy evidence. Among other things the girl’s frock, which had been secured by a search party from Devisthan, was washed clean with detergent by a set of unscrupulous officers. Unfortunately for them, an investigation relying on advanced forensics managed to undo the damage.

Nonetheless, such interruptions to the course of justice gave the judiciary enough reason to transfer the case to the district and sessions court, Pathankot (Punjab). This greatly paved the way for the passage of the final judgement in a record time of 17 months. Six individuals out of the total seven that were initially chargesheeted were sentenced. In reading out the judgement the bench led by Dr Tejwinder Singh, pronounced the rape–murder of the Bakarwal girl as being an act no less than ‘devilish and monstrous’. The bench incurred no hesitation on the grounds of the existing evidence to sentence Sanji Ram, Deepak Khajuria (special police officer) and Pravesh Kumar (civilian) to life imprisonment. Likewise, Anand Dutta (sub-inspector), Tilak Raj (head constable) and Surender Verma (special police officer) were sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for their role in destroying evidence and misleading the investigation. Sanji Ram’s son, Vishal, was given the ‘benefit of doubt’ for the lack of conclusive evidence.

However, there is always the tendency that acts of ‘monstrosity’ be read in increasingly a-historical ways for the shock they customarily invoke. Stating this does not undermine the credible ways in which the Pathankot court took cognizance of the ongoing friction between the Bakarwals and Hindu residents over the last few years. Evidence of ‘strained relations’ between local residents and the Bakarwals was gathered from a series of First Information Reports (FIRs) filed against the Bakarwals since 2016. But an assessment of this tension, spanning no more than a couple of years, can scarcely speak anything for developments that might be more than a century old, a thing that Kennedy leaves us pondering.

Indeed, what curtails a fuller historicity of the events at Kathua is the limited attention that has been paid to the facet of the Bakarwals as nomads. Only a detailed perusal of the 412-page judgement that has been passed recently might reveal the full degree of the same. In lieu of the same, an editorial appearing in The Hindu (2019) in the wake of the aforementioned judgement takes little note of the specific vulnerability of the Bakarwals as nomads and goes to state that the verdict ‘must be seen as a victory over communal propaganda’. In contrast, paying attention to the nomad, particularly nomadic women, throws open the window into colonial legacies that have beginnings in the later part of the nineteenth century, despite which, the nomadic heritage of the Bakarwals is read, if at all, like a sub-text to their Muslim background. Even the popular news portal Firstpost (2019), an otherwise authentic source of information, refers to the victims as a ‘Bakarwal (nomads) community’ in a more recent report. This parenthesis asks that we unpack the nomadic half of the Bakarwals—a half that has suffered a steady amputation, even if textually, right from the beginning. Even the most conscientious journalism over the last 2 years has preferred not to ask, who are the nomadic Bakarwals, leave alone the status of the Bakarwals as nomadic Muslims. It has preferred to stay with the question, ‘Who are the Bakarwal Muslims?’—this being the title of a trifling article appearing in the Financial Express in the early part of 2018.

Much of this has gone to simplify the matter at hand, making it available for a speedy but naive critique of communalism. Almost to match the occlusion of the nomad at Kathua, the description of the chief accused, Sanji Ram, has also become unbearably one sided. For instance, the news blog, Scroll.in (2018a), incurs no hesitation in introducing Ram as nothing more than the ‘custodian’ of Devisthan. A lesser-known fact is that Sanji Ram was also a revenue official, the likes of whom, in Kennedy’s mind, were supposed to serve as gatekeepers of a colonially ordered landscape. While the designation of Sanji Ram as an erstwhile revenue officer does not dilute the role of misogynistic and Hindutva elements at Kathua, it surely serves to lay bare the longer, and more loathsome copulation, between a colonial mandate and communal sentiments. To better understand how this dynamic centres upon the feminine body, we must return to the person of Kennedy.

Of ‘Criminal Classes’

In the early part of the twentieth century, Kennedy was appointed by the Frazer Commission. The Commission’s overall objective was one of reorganizing the police forces in Bombay Presidency. Kennedy must have proven his merit, such that he was promoted to the rank of Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIGP) by 1904. In the same year Kennedy was also asked to stand in for the Commissioner of Bombay city, H. G. Gell, as Gell had been granted a year’s furlough. When riots broke out in the city, Kennedy played his part so effectively that Gell was scarcely missed (Edwardes, 1923, pp. 120–122). Kennedy was subsequently posted to Poona and entrusted with the significant duty of laying the blueprint for the establishment of a Criminal Investigation Department (CID). The plan was turned in by 1905. ⁴ It was in the pending couple of years that Kennedy absorbed himself in scholastic matters. The fruit of his labour was delivered this time in the form of the Notes on the Criminal Classes of Bombay Presidency. Kennedy never attempted another book, making his solitary contribution deserving of the epithet of a ‘Rare Book’, as I had discovered it in the cabinet of the very same title.

An exceeding concern in Kennedy’s Notes hovers around castes and tribes that did not abide by the norms of stable residence and settled agriculture. Historians such as Anand Yang (1985), Susan Freitag (1991) and Meena Radhakrishna (2001) have differently held that the colonial prejudice against nomads on the above-mentioned grounds was the primary reason for their criminalization. The passage of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871, which as much declared 190 tribes and castes as being ‘criminals by birth,’ was at the heart of such processes. Though it is well known that the CTA made a series of itinerant communities available for colonial raids, prosecution and forced internment, it can always be asked if historians have paid the requisite attention to the differential terms on which the women of such communities were criminalized. The construction of feminine criminality in Kennedy’s writings, rather interestingly, unfolds from within the broader thematic of ‘criminal classes’, the precise term that was richly embossed on the cover of his book.

Kennedy was not the first to use the terminology though. Fredrick Mullaly, almost 15 years earlier in 1892, had already deployed the same conceptuality with quite some effect. Mullaly, unlike Kennedy, was with the Madras police. If Kennedy was not the first to take recourse to the verbose of criminal classes, he was not the last either. In a matter of another decade, F. C. Daly (1916) tendered his own notes on criminal classes, this time coming from within the police ranks of the Bengal Presidency. Kennedy, however, must be given his due. He attended to the specific dispensations, behavioural patterns, intelligence, social organization, cultural beliefs and a believed lingua franca of the criminal classes with an unparalleled enthusiasm. The voluminous nature of his Notes must have made the slimmer contributions coming from the pen of Mullaly and Daly appear premature in comparison.

Incidentally, by the time Kennedy adapted the category of criminal classes for his own purposes, the coinage had become a seeming tactic to get around the limitations ‘tribe’ and ‘caste’ imposed on account of the ethnological discussions surrounding them. Such discussions made it necessary for police officials to continually qualify a social group as a tribe or caste. Beyond a point, the likes of Kennedy had little patience for this. The term classes appeared to help a police fraternity sidestep cumbersome clarifications. But this does not mean that police officials did not aggregate the racial bias that stemmed from commentaries relating to ‘savage’ tribes or ‘menial’ castes into the melting pot of the criminal classes at the same time. In other words, the criminal classes were a reasonably indistinct but highly racialized stock of communities. This is what enabled Kennedy to freely lump observations relating to the ‘Bhatras’, ‘Bhamptas’, ‘Bouris’, ‘Harnis’, ‘Mang-Garudis’, ‘Nowsarias’, ‘Pardees’ and ‘Sansiyas’, among several others. In accounting for a breed of ‘foreign criminals’ that arrived in Bombay Presidency, Kennedy also brought the ‘trans-frontier Afridis’, ‘Cabulis’, ‘Kandharis’, ‘Pashtuns’, ‘Peshawaris’ and ‘Rohilas’ under the umbrella term of criminal classes.

Nomadic Femininity—Chronicle of a Rape Foretold

Initially, it appears as though Kennedy accorded equal guilt to both men and women among the criminal classes. Kennedy frequently observed how both man and woman among the ‘Kaikadis’ were ‘dark, dirty, untidy’ (p. 66). Among the ‘Ghantichors’ both boy and girl children were ‘early trained’ to become criminal ‘experts’ (p. 26). The term ‘both sexes’ appears on numerous occasions in Kennedy’s text, so as to suggest the uniformity of police treatment. Irrespective of which, we encounter a minor slip when ‘both sexes’ of nomadic parties are suspected of partaking in the pleasures of alcohol and sex. The fact that some pleasures were lifted in equal measure by women must have offended Kennedy’s Victorian morality, for this is precisely where the pledge to pursue ‘both sexes’, in ways altogether impartial, falters and contradicts itself. The colonial narrative changes direction at such junctures, only to hurtle in the direction of the feminine subject with a specific disciplinary intent.

Almost as though intending to build a case along such lines, we hear that the Bhatus and Sansiya women, more than men, were ‘not particularly virtuous’. This virtue had its degrees, and frequently varied in proportion to the roving tendencies of a tribe. The more nomadic a tribe, the more lacking in character its women were bound to be. Owing to which women of ‘gipsy tribes’ were deemed to be the worst of the lot. For Kennedy ‘gipsy’ women were only too willing to be ‘habitually prostituted’ by their male relatives (p. 329). Perhaps, for similar reasons ‘Harni’ women, that strayed as close as Ferozepur to Kathua, were described as nothing short of ‘rank prostitutes’ (p. 294). We further learn that the itinerant existence of the Harnis, just like several other tribes, granted them a degree of immunity to colonial surveillance. It placed them in an area of dark as far as the colonial eye was concerned. It was this zone of relative invisibility that invariably activated a lewd imagination, even if English, causing an untold and punishable promiscuity to be handed to nomadic women.

On many an occasion Kennedy’s opinions were framed by the versions of native ‘informers’, who being recruited from rural settled society were certainly not above the rules of patriarchy (pp. v, vi). Despite which it was in Kennedy’s capacity to preserve an incorruptibility for his police staff with dangerous consequences for a pending future. By briefly venturing into post-Independence India, we learn through Kalpana Kannabiran (2008, p. 234) that it has been in the advantage of the contemporary police, particularly when implicated in cases of custodial rape, to decree the victim a ‘prostitute’. The warped logic behind such a move being that women of ‘easy-virtue’ do not find rape sexually objectionable. This makes their consent something that can be automatically implied. ⁵ Kannabiran, nonetheless, has nothing to say of nomadic societies, and the sign of immorality they continue to bear despite the fact that the CTA was scrapped in 1952 on humanitarian grounds at the specific insistence of Nehru.

Returning to Kennedy, we find, he strongly believed nomadic men were accustomed to fielding ‘young and attractive’ women from their community ‘to get around’ officers that were either ‘troublesome’ or ‘impressionable’. Such terms nearly cast police staff as being anything between overtly sincere and gullible, but never mala fide. In contrast, nomadic women, already depraved in Kennedy’s exposition, were denoted as wily and Machiavellian ‘adepts’ (p. 68). The manner in which this must have legitimated the sexual exploitation of nomadic women at the hands of a police staff becomes conceivable in historical time. This is doubly confirmed not so much through anything Kennedy states in excess of what has already been detailed, but a parallel silence that remains preserved in his Notes. Indeed, we never hear of a single nomadic woman in Kennedy’s observing resisting the (mis)appropriation of her body, be it within or outside her immediate society. Such women either did not exist for Kennedy, or they were subjects that never spoke.

Truly so, when the weight of Spivak’s (2018) influential question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, is shifted from nomadic women to the girl child in nomadic societies, it acquires graver dimensions. As mentioned earlier, the CTA (1871) had already allocated ‘born’, ‘heredity’ and ‘instinctive’ criminality to nearly 190 tribes across the subcontinent by the time Kennedy put pen to paper. If these tribes were decried as being ‘criminals by birth’ for various reasons, including itinerant and peripatetic behaviours, then infants also came under the colonial scanner. For which reason alone, Kennedy averred that nomadic children remained a crucial part of the criminal organization of nomadic societies. Kennedy was certain that if such children were effectively interrogated they would ‘supply information which their elders cannot be persuaded to disclose’ (p. 248). Where interrogation was not possible, Kennedy insisted that fledgling nomads should be ‘shadowed’ by a village police (p. 73). Though one never gets to know what Kennedy meant by this shadowing business, the disturbing silhouettes of the convicts of the Kathua rape–murder seem to become discernible at such points.

Satadru Sen (2012), in historical capacity, has pertinently explained the manner in which ‘problematic’ children in the colony awaited, at best, early reform through evangelical discourses in quarantined settings removed from parental homes. And at worst, they were potent carriers of criminal instincts asking to be nipped in the bud through corporal measures. If the body of the nomadic girl child remains a moral void asking to be physically punished and filled with religious discourse alike, the rape of a Bakarwal girl child in a temple shrine, indeed, speaks of a disconcerting mix of both.

The Convicts, and a Mob—Finer Details

Still, it remains for us to note that the perpetrators of the Kathua rape–murder are not confined to the police department—the one to which Kennedy belonged, and for which he had primarily scripted his Notes. To comprehend the network at play, one must attend to Kennedy’s preoccupations with territorial borders. To say something of physical borders in themselves, Gunnel Cederloff (2014, pp. 36–37) has lately made a case for how regimes between different kingdoms in the pre-colonial epoch were separated by ‘border zones’. Such capacious zones were in the nature of an enduring area of grey that sustained nomadic thriving in a manner that wasn’t without its own share of hardships. The eighteenth century, however, witnessed the initiation of a series of surveys, such as the Great Trigonometric Survey, which compressed zones into surgical and impermeable ‘border lines’ through a range of cartographic practices. This subsequently brought nomads into sharper conflict with a peasant society situated in a changing revenue order. To nearly prove this true, Kennedy’s predecessors had already begun to refer to nomadic groups as notorious and lawless ‘gangs’ that upset colonial visions of an agrarian set up.

Kennedy’s personal genius lay in how he took such talk on gangs to a dangerous level by labelling their movement as nothing short of an ‘evil’. This sinister description may have accrued on account of the multifarious collaborations between the colonial police and Evangelists, who had collectively aspired to civilize the nomads in the second half of the nineteenth century. But for the fact that this ‘evil’ acquired shape against a colonial reordering of space, particularly land, Kennedy further contended that, ‘The only way to cure the evil is through revenue authorities’ (p. 264, emphasis added). Needless to state, the role of revenue officials in this respect was not to singularly transform nomads into settled agriculturalists with economic returns in mind, as much as prevent the spread of a moral contagion which nomadic women additionally represented.

The role of such evil-eradicating revenue officials was intricately linked with a village-level cadre. It was in discussing naught but the Land systems in British India, Baden-Powell (1892, p. 28) had averred more than a decade prior to Kennedy that ‘police officers’ were customarily required to ‘deal with village headmen and rural notables, who, as landowners, have by law certain duties laid on them in connection with the repression and discovery of crime’. Kennedy, on his part, referred to such notables as ‘village officers’. Such village officers were recruited from rural society into the lower most ranks of the police establishment, making them starkly similar to the Special Police Officers (SPOs) of today. They were most certainly male, much like the Deepak Khajuria and Surender Verma of the present Kathua rape–murder case.

Such village officers could be ‘troublesome’ and ‘impressionable’ in Kennedy’s reading, as shared earlier. But, more than anything, in being recruited out of local native society into the lower most ranks of a British establishment, such village officers (or what we call SPOs now) hovered menacingly between ‘civilian’ and ‘official’ capacity. Since they occupied the interstices between state and society, it was not unusual for the larger rural society to perceive them as important conduits for leveraging state patronage, enhancing status, and building political allegiances. As a result, it was also not usual for a rural peasantry to put its weight behind such village officers where colonial campaigns against nomadic societies were concerned. This verily transformed official crusades against nomads into public drives, giving it the character of a social responsibility. The social nature of the current-day campaign against the Bakarwals follows a familiar pattern in this sense. One that is revealed not so much from the convicts that have been gladly sentenced, but those dozens of FIRs filed by relatively anonymous local residents against the Bakarwals over the last couple of years, as also the angry mobs that thronged the streets of Kathua demanding the release of the accused from police custody in the days immediately following Sanji Ram’s arrest.

Interestingly, if we return to Kennedy, the strict distinctions between Hindu and Muslim did not obtain in his treatise. ⁶ In a lucid article appearing in the Indian Express, its author, Adrija Roychowdhury (2018), confirms that the religion of the Bakarwals also speaks of an impressive and lasting confluence between Hinduism and Islam. But the story changes with every little failure of the secular state, which we have been noticing for decades now. And it acquires a pathological gravity when the nation comes into the grip of a Hindutva ideology that works with the reified dichotomies of Hindu and Muslim. In such situations, the moral contagion that nomads have historically represented acquires strong communal overtones. If nomads have been seen as a threat to spaces of settled civility, they are now additionally perceived as a threat to Hindu purity. The body of the nomadic girl child caught in such intersections is the worst to suffer. In her death she only reveals the zest with which a Hindu rashtra has drawn its borders, and that too in a way that marks no significant break from an ignoble colonial inheritance.

Reprising Kennedy

Unfortunately, the criminalization of nomadic femininity as part of a grand ‘civilizing’ mission in the colony is matched by civil society’s carefully preserved blind spot for the nomad in the present. Nothing instantiates this better than an ‘Open Letter’ scripted to Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi by a group of retired bureaucrats in April 2018. This letter, available on the website of Outlook (2018), justifiably holds the ‘Sangh Parivar’ and ‘rabid communal agents’ responsible for the bestial crime committed at Kathua. But despite some valid concerns, it places the bureaucracy by itself beyond the realm of what it describes as the deplorable ‘grammar of our politics’. This brave effort to address a concern directly to the Prime Minister, thus lacks any capacity for reflection over how the ‘office’ of the concerned perpetrators—‘revenue’, ‘police’ and ‘special’—has been invested in ways that precede the present government. The obliteration of nomadic realities, in fact, serves to place the bureaucracy ‘outside’ a colonial deployment, also the pale of history. A fuller picture evades us. ⁷

On the other hand, another set of activists have been overly eager to pin every last ray of hope for the Bakarwals on the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006. But the FRA remains profoundly unaware, both in letter and in spirit, of the historical processes by which nomadic femininity has been criminalized over the last century and more. Almost to prove this right, a lengthy account appearing in the Down to Earth titled, ‘Kathua incident reveals threats to pastoral nomads of Jammu and Kashmir’, treats the nomad as a gender-neutral term. Even worse, it believes that the plight of the Bakarwals will ‘not improve unless it gets settled’ (Kukreti, 2018). This only confirms our desire to recognize the forest rights of Bakarwals only in the event of erasing the nomadic half of their ethnicity.

Something better might have been expected of spokespersons for the ex-criminal tribes, or vimukta jatis as they are known with a greater degree of sensitivity post 1952. They could have lobbied for some revisionary measures within the discourse of forest rights. But they have fared worse than FRA activists by maintaining a quizzical silence. Possibly, they remain of the opinion that the colonial project remains confined to an ‘original’ listing of criminal tribes dating back to 1871. It is true that Kennedy does not directly mention the Bakarwals in his own text. But should this go to mean that the colonial prerogative cannot extend itself to include new geographies and communities? Certainly not.

Incidentally, some of Kennedy’s most active years were confined to those that were characterized by the ‘Bombay postal strike’, ‘the mill-hand strikes’ and ‘Tilak riots’ (Edwardes, 1923, pp. 120–122). For all the effort Kennedy must have put into suppressing Hindu rioting groups in the colony, the agents of Hindu nationalism have proven to be his greatest torch bearers. They have carried his message from Bombay Presidency to the distant frontiers of the nation, revealing the colonial wheels of communalism. In any case, Kennedy was promoted to the top position of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) of Bombay Presidency in the years following the publication of his Notes. He retired from this rank, the highest he could have ascended to. Long gone, he reminds us of how the nomadic background of the Bakarwals complicates their vulnerability as Muslims, more so Muslim women and girl children. His immortal spirit ensures that the communal sentiment works, aspires and even dreams of a Hindu rashtra, through persisting colonial structures. But when and where we forsake the nomad, Kennedy nearly gives us the slip. And it is only by chance that we catch him staring at us from a glass cabinet.