Politics of 'hereditary' crime

The Criminal Tribes Act was a colonial piece of legislation which has left a legacy in the form of tens of millions of Denotified Tribe members. No longer nomadic and bereft of their earlier occupations, they are today suspected of being desperate criminals by the police and public alike, and continue to be hounded as in colonial times. MEENA RADHAKRISHNA's recent book traces the historical factors which went into the creation of this unique category of sub-humanity. Exclusive extracts.

* * *

The social category generally known as the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs) covers a population approximately of 2 crores. Soon after Independence, the communities notified as criminal tribals were denotified by the Government. This was followed by the substitution of a series of acts, generally entitled 'Habitual Offenders Act'. This preserved most of the provisions of the former CT Act, except the premise that an entire community can be 'born' criminal. The denotification and the passing of the HOAs should have ended the misery of the communities penalised under the CT Act. But, that has not happened.

After independence, various state governments have done little to restore land to the DNTs. Schemes for economic upliftment do not seem to have benefited them. The rate of illiteracy among the DNTs is higher than among Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, malnutrition more frequent and provisions for education and health care almost negligible since most of them have remained nomadic. Above all, there is no limit to the atrocities that the DNTs have to face.

Source: Internet

* * *

THE ostensible purpose of the (Criminal Tribes) Act had been to suppress "hereditary criminal" sections of Indian society. The notion of crime and criminality had, however, been changing all through the 19th Century ....

Causes of crime were attributed by thinkers and policy makers of the times variously to drunkenness, increasing poverty, increasing prosperity, rapid urbanisation, overcrowding of residential areas, universal and natural decline in morals, unsettled family life and increasing population. A strong school of thought, put forward by criminologists and scientists, and much subscribed to, held that crime was inherited over generations in a family through parents or ancestors. The concept of a "hereditary criminal class", was an important and attractive one, and a consequence was the deflection of serious enquiries into the causes of crime.

... The 1880s had been deemed to be a particularly hard period by the policy maker, with economic depression, unemployment, strikes and growing political radicalism. Poverty, alcoholism, ill health (and crime) had not disappeared in England in spite of decades of social legislation. There was great temptation for believing - preferably buttressed with scientific proof - that crime was a hereditary trait, and called for measures to re- engineer society on biological, rather than social or political bases. The new concept of Eugene (good genes), coined by Francis Galton, seemed to provide an answer, among others, to the problem of criminal classes as well. One eugenicist included "pauperism" in his list of hereditary traits, another, criminality. (i) The social policies contemplated by eugenicists were directed against the social residuum of paupers and persistent criminal offenders.

All over the world, including England, eugenic societies targeted criminals in prisons by forcibly sterilising them, so as to avoid passing on the gene for crime to the next generation.

... Though individual crime in India was also seen to stem from a hereditary cause, the investing of entire communities with hereditary criminality was radically different in the case of India and Europe. In India, it was based not on the notion of genetically transmitted crime, but on crime as a profession passed on from one generation of criminal caste to another: like a carpenter would pass on his trade to the next generation, hereditary criminal caste members would pass on this profession to their offspring. Thus hereditary crime in India never got seriously linked to biological determinism. This happened not so much because of scepticism regarding the concept of genetically transmitted crime, but because of a particular view of Indian social structures.

* * *

... The developing disciplines of anthropometry and anthropology also contributed to notions of hereditary criminality. These disciplines in India addressed themselves to the study of particular sections of the Indian population, mostly indigenous "tribal" communities and itinerant groups, and contributed in a very substantial way to the conceptual outline of a criminal in the popular mind. By focussing on bizarre or exotic ritual aspects of the social lives of such communities, and at the same time also on their differential anthropometric measurements, these disciplines created categories of the civilised and the barbaric individual. In the popular ethnographic literature of the period, a sketch was drawn of a criminal who possessed not just bizarre social customs, but a strange body and psyche as well, "which had criminality written all over". (ii) These disciplines, therefore, held that criminality was a hereditary trait and one, in fact, which could actually be perceived in the physical features. The communities which were trawled under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), not unexpectedly, were those which were also grist for the anthropological mill of the time.

... The relationship between itinerant and sedentary communities has become particularly problematic in modern times. The more the itinerant communities get marginalised to the main sphere of society because of transformative processes, the more they become suspect from the point of view of the sedentary society they interact with. In real terms, their increasing marginality simply compounds the already existing prejudices against them. In Europe, gypsies became gradually marginalised to the established system with the processes of industrialisation. (iii) In India, as described above, it was the colonial revenue policies which destroyed the itinerant communities' earlier trading practises.

As they become marginalised to the main system, prejudices and myths that already exist about nomads have a fresh lease of life, or come to the surface more explicitly ... But it is worth emphasising here that many of the above prejudices are not held so much by the local people, but by the local authorities. (iv) In the Indian case, these would mean the British administration, the police establishment, the high caste sections and the village landlords.

More grievances were added to the standard list of charges against itinerants by the Indian authorities: their lack of predictability of movements implied a potential lack of control; their shifting abodes meant shifting loyalties to different patrons, and so they were seen to be perennially disloyal; the impossibility of taxing them, or raising any kind of revenue out of them, unlike their sedentary counterparts was a major irritant to the administration. (v) In addition, for the keepers of social morality, lack of visible social institutions implied complete disorder in their community life. Their lack of written codes of conduct, and absence of articulated norms of morality implied absolute licentiousness.

* * *

At another level, there were other problems. This community had amongst its members, acrobats, singers, dancers, tight ropewalkers and fortune-tellers. More and more, like their counterparts all over the world, street entertainment provided by them was seen to be a threat to public order. Since they always collected a large interested crowd around themselves - and were quite a large crowd by themselves - their presence made the local authorities nervous. The British administration was increasingly inclined to favour forms of recreation which could be supervised by themselves, and would not precipitate what they called "disorderly and riotous behaviour" on the part of the spectators.

It is worth mentioning here that, in England, all laws relating to the gypsies were to protect the settled communities from itinerant ones and never the other way around. (vi) Large-scale harassment of these communities by members of settled communities was a common feature in Europe, and there is evidence of this happening in the Madras Presidency as well.

It is also important at this juncture to keep in mind the ambivalences and contradictions in the attitude of sedentary communities to itinerant ones. These are symptomatic of the latter's simultaneous usefulness and marginality to the established systems with which they have to interact. It was, for instance, felt that these communities must be settled somewhere, but "not near us, not here". This is reminiscent of a similar ambivalence: "they should visit our village (given their useful services), but should not stay too long". Further, they were expected to become a part of the mainstream, but were expected also to be segregated from the main society while this was being done, so as not to corrupt it. They were, in fact, romanticised in imagination, especially in English fiction and poetry in the case of the gypsies. (vii) This was for their independent spirit; their dark attractive looks or bright clothes and jewellery as in the case of the Indian banjaras; and their supposed healthy outdoor life. In general, there was a lot of romance and adventure associated with their travels. (viii) However, when confronted in reality, there was fear and dread and they were shunned if not despised. In fact, a number of English ladies in their leisure time in India drew banjara men and women in a romanticised light while their law-making menfolk made them out to be ferocious criminals. (ix)

* * *

It seems inevitable that the nature of the relationship between these two different systems, and the gaps in knowledge of each other's real ways of living will lead to myth making on both sides. While sedentary societies experience and express an overarching discomfort, a suspicion regarding itinerants which makes for fertile ground for seeing them as potential criminals, we know little, unfortunately, about the myths that the itinerant people have about sedentary societies. At any rate, the prejudices that the sedentary society held formed a major strand that fed into the Criminal Tribes Act.

References:

(i) Stepan 1982: 123

(ii) For a detailed discussion of some of the currents which went into the making of the discipline of Anthropology, see Meena Radhakrishna, "Colonialism, Evolutionism and Anthropology - A Critique of the History of Ideas 1850-1930", Research in Progress Papers, History and Society, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, June, 1997

(iii) For an excellent account of gypsies in England, see David Mayall, Gypsy Travellers in 19th Century, Cambridge, 1988

(iv) The local people must find the nomads quite useful for the unusual wares they bring periodically. Their various skills of weaving mats or making baskets or playing musical instruments, and more dramatically in the case of acrobats and dancers make them a colourful and interesting presence, in all probability providing relief and diversion from the tedium of daily routine.

(v) I am grateful to Dr. David Washbrook for bringing to my notice the point about taxing.

(vi) Mayall 1988: 180

(vii) Mayall 1988: 87

(viii) It has been pointed out that the "gypsies exotic potential" is frequently exploited by writers in general. Judith Okley, The Traveller-Gypsies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 7

(ix) Banjaras were a community much more in evidence all over India, unlike the Yerukulas who operated only in the limited Telegu regions of the Madras Presidency. In fact, banjaras were called the "exporters" of grain and salt to distant provinces and regions by the Madras administration, and Yerukulas termed "local" traders. Essentially, banjaras were a numerically larger community, operating on a much larger scale, traversing a much larger geographic area. For the same reason, they escaped the Criminal Tribes Act for a longer period compared to the Yerukulas, being relatively less vulnerable.

Dishonoured by History: 'Criminal Tribes' and British Colonial Policy, Meena Radhakrishna, Orient Longman Limited, New Delhi, 2001, p. 192, Rs. 435, foreword by Mahasweta Devi.

The writer is a social anthropologist at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. She is currently a UGC fellow, and has recently been awarded the Senior ICSSR Fellowship. Author of several articles on colonial anthropology, she also contributes pieces on human rights issues.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Not for those below 12
Next     : Conform or die