In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, British colonial rule in India initiated a series of legal and administrative interventions that profoundly reshaped lives, identities and social locations of numerous nomadic and semi-nomadic communities in Punjab. These communities, whose livelihoods were traditionally grounded in pastoralism, itinerant craft production, hunting, trading, performance, and seasonal migration, occupied a social world structured by mobility rather than permanent settlement. However, within the colonial imagination, such mobility increasingly came to be viewed with suspicion. As the British state sought to consolidate territorial control, rationalise administration and intensify economic extraction, groups that moved across space without fixed residence or agricultural attachment were cast as obstacles to order and governance. These anxieties culminated in the enactment of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, extended in practice from 1872 onwards, which legally transformed entire communities into criminals by birth. The Act did not merely criminalise acts, it criminalised identities, curtailing mobility, enforcing surveillance and institutionalizing a regime of control that endured well beyond the colonial period. Even after 1947, the legacy of this law continued to shape the post-colonial status of these groups as “ex-criminal” or denotified tribes.
Central to the Act was a set of deeply embedded colonial assumptions about nomadism, mobility, and criminality. The colonial state privileged settled, sedentary populations because they were easier to enumerate, tax, regulate and incorporate into bureaucratic systems of governance. Fixed residence enabled the state to map populations onto land, census categories and administrative units, thereby rendering society legible in ways that nomadic life resisted. British officials often interpreted the absence of permanent agriculture, private property and stable hierarchical authority among nomadic groups as signs of social disorder and moral deficiency. Mobility itself was equated with instability, lawlessness, and evasion of authority, while settlement was framed as a marker of civilisation and progress. Through ethnographic surveys and administrative reports, colonial knowledge systems mapped social worth onto spatial fixity, presenting nomadism not as an alternative mode of life but as a problem to be corrected.
Within this framework, the Criminal Tribes Act introduced an unprecedented form of collective criminalisation. Entire communities were notified as “criminal tribes” without reference to individual guilt or judicial process. Membership in a particular caste or tribe was deemed sufficient proof of criminal propensity, rooted in the colonial fiction of hereditary criminality. Once notified, individuals were required to register with local authorities, submit to regular surveillance, and seek official permission to move beyond prescribed boundaries. Everyday life was thus transformed into a condition of permanent suspicion, where ordinary acts of travel, work, or residence became subject to police scrutiny. The law effectively collapsed the distinction between social identity and criminal behaviour, producing lifelong stigma that attached not only to individuals but to families and generations.
The application of the Criminal Tribes Act in Punjab was particularly extensive and consequential. Introduced shortly after the province’s annexation in 1849, the Act was enforced in a region that the British regarded as strategically vital to imperial security and agrarian production. Communities such as the Sansi, Bauria, Bazigar, Bangala, Barad, Gandhila, Nat, and others were gradually brought under notification during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For these groups, notification meant the systematic regulation of movement through compulsory registration with police stations, the issuance of passes for travel and the threat of punishment for unauthorised mobility.
The colonial state also imposed settlements where families were required to reside within fixed geographic limits, directly undermining seasonal migrations, pastoral routes and itinerant occupational networks that had sustained these communities for generations. Surveillance became a routine feature of existence, enforced through roll calls, identity documentation, and constant policing that marked these populations as inherently suspect and socially dangerous.
The impact of this regime was intensified by the broader political economy of colonial Punjab. As canal colonies expanded and railways, irrigation networks and agricultural settlements transformed the landscape, the British state increasingly favoured predictable, stationary populations that could be integrated into revenue systems and agrarian production. Nomadic groups, by contrast, appeared administratively illegible and economically marginal within this vision of development. Their mobility conflicted with the colonial desire for spatial order, fixed property relations and disciplined labour. As a result, the Criminal Tribes Act functioned not only as a penal measure but as a mechanism for restructuring society in accordance with colonial priorities.
One of the most significant yet often implicit dimensions of the Criminal Tribes Act was its role in advancing sedentarization as a colonial policy. By criminalising mobility and imposing fixed residence, the Act sought to discipline nomadic life and replace it with sedentary existence. Sedentarization served multiple overlapping objectives. Administratively, settled populations were far easier to count, monitor and govern through censuses and police institutions. Economically, a sedentary workforce aligned with the colonial vision of a modern economy based on settled agriculture, wage labor, and market integration. Mobility associated with pastoralism, itinerant crafts, and seasonal work was viewed as incompatible with these goals. Politically, colonial authorities often associated movement with the potential for unrest, resistance, cattle theft or banditry, projecting isolated instances of conflict onto entire communities and using these narratives to justify restrictive policies.
Through the establishment of forced settlements and assigned territories, the colonial state attempted to remake nomadic communities into stable, governable subjects. These settlements were not voluntary villages but coercive spaces of confinement where movement was tightly regulated and economic autonomy severely constrained. The disruption of migration routes and occupational practices fractured long-standing systems of social organisation and economic interdependence, leaving many communities impoverished and dependent on exploitative labour arrangements. Sedentarization, far from being a benign civilising mission, functioned as a tool of domination that dismantled alternative ways of living and knowing the land.
The construction of “criminal tribes” in Punjab was further reinforced by colonial ethnography and census operations. Officials such as Sir Denzil Ibbetson, whose work Panjab Castes sought to classify and rank communities, embedded assumptions of criminal predisposition within caste and tribal identities. These intellectual projects naturalised colonial stereotypes by presenting them as scientific observations, lending administrative legitimacy to the collective punishment of entire groups. Combined with post-1857 anxieties about rebellion and control, these classificatory practices ensured that the label of criminality became deeply entrenched in both colonial policy and popular perception.
Although the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1949, shortly after independence, its effects did not disappear. Formerly notified communities were denotified and came to be known as denotified or ex-criminal tribes but the stigma associated with their earlier classification persisted. Police practices and social attitudes continued to mark them as habitual offenders, and post-colonial legislation such as the Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 reproduced many of the surveillance mechanisms pioneered under colonial rule. As a result, legal freedom did not translate into social or economic emancipation.
In conclusion, the colonial construction of “criminal tribes” in Punjab was not a neutral response to crime but a politically charged strategy of governance rooted in the desire to control mobility and impose sedentary norms. By equating nomadism with criminality, the British colonial state justified a sedentarization project that privileged fixed residence, agrarian labor and bureaucratic legibility over mobile ways of life. This project not only disrupted traditional livelihoods but also produced enduring forms of marginalisation and stigma that continue to shape the experiences of ex-criminal tribes in contemporary India. The history of these communities thus reveals how colonial power operated through law, knowledge and spatial control to redefine social identities in profoundly lasting ways.
Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2025
