The study of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871-72 is significant because it reveals how colonial power extended beyond the regulation of crime to reorganisation of society, mobility and identity. In Punjab, the Act became a crucial instrument through which the British sought to impose a settled agrarian order by classifying, monitoring and controlling communities whose ways of life existed outside colonial administrative structures. Examining this legislation, therefore, provides deeper insight into the relationship between law, state authority, social hierarchy and the enduring legacies of colonial systems of surveillance.
The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871-72 emerged not simply as a response to crime but as part of a broader colonial project aimed at restructuring Punjab into a settled, taxable and governable agrarian society. The British administration sought to establish a social order based on fixed villages, clearly demarcated property rights, revenue records, and bureaucratic oversight. Such a system depended upon populations being visible and locatable. Nomadic and semi-nomadic communities—including Sansis, Baurias, Bazigars, Nats, Pakhiwas, and sections of Baloch pastoral groups inhabiting jhoks—stood outside this framework. Their seasonal migrations, flexible social organisation, and dependence on mobile economies made them difficult to enumerate, tax, and police. Consequently, mobility itself came to be viewed with suspicion.
The Act reflected colonial anxieties about territorial control, agrarian expansion and administrative legibility. As canal colonies spread across Punjab and agricultural settlements expanded, traditional grazing routes and pastoral spaces were increasingly enclosed within regimes of private property and settled cultivation. Many mobile communities found their customary livelihoods undermined. Under these changing conditions, some groups did engage in cattle theft, raiding, smuggling or banditry. Among certain Baloch communities living in jhoks in Jhang district, for instance, cattle raiding and inter-tribal predation had long formed part of frontier economies that predated British rule. Yet these practices were neither universal nor hereditary. They were often shaped by ecological pressures, economic marginalisation, and local political circumstances. The colonial state, however, transformed such localised acts into evidence of an inherited criminal disposition and replaced individual culpability with collective guilt.
The enforcement of the Criminal Tribes Act depended not only upon colonial officials but also upon a close alliance between the state and Punjab’s landed elites. Following the annexation of Punjab in 1849, the British cultivated the support of zamindars, lambardars, zaildars, tribal chiefs, and large agricultural proprietors who became crucial intermediaries in the administration of rural society. The colonial state lacked the capacity to monitor every village, pasture and migration route directly and therefore relied upon these local notables as its eyes and ears. Both the British administration and landed elites shared a common interest in promoting settled agriculture and restricting mobility. The economic and political power of landlords rested upon secure property rights, stable village populations and clearly defined territorial boundaries. Nomadic pastoralists, itinerant traders and mobile labourers represented an alternative social order that did not fit comfortably within this agrarian framework.
Village surveillance became a central mechanism of control. Local headmen and landlords supplied intelligence, reported the presence of allegedly suspicious individuals, monitored movements, and assisted police investigations. Because nomadic groups lacked permanent residences and influential patrons within village society, they were particularly vulnerable to accusation. The complaints of landed interests often shaped official perceptions of criminality. Conflicts over grazing rights, migration routes, livestock movement, and access to resources were frequently interpreted through the lens of law and order rather than as disputes arising from competing economic systems. Colonial knowledge about so-called criminal tribes was therefore filtered through the perspectives of property-owning classes whose interests aligned with sedentary agriculture.
The Criminal Tribes Act thus became a mechanism for compulsory sedentarisation. Registration, surveillance, pass systems, roll calls, and confinement to settlements were intended to destroy the social basis of nomadic life. Communities that continued to inhabit seasonal settlements such as Baloch jhoks or resisted restrictions on movement were regarded as recalcitrant and inherently lawless. Resistance to registration and settlement was interpreted not as opposition to arbitrary state power but as proof of criminal tendencies. Through police reports, ethnographic surveys, and administrative classifications, criminality came to be represented as a hereditary trait transmitted across generations. Once a community was notified under the Act, every act of mobility reinforced official assumptions about its supposed criminal nature.
A balanced historical assessment must avoid both colonial stereotypes and romanticised portrayals of tribal innocence. Some individuals within notified communities undoubtedly committed offences, just as members of settled populations did. The significance of the Criminal Tribes Act lies not in the existence of crime but in the manner in which the colonial state conceptualised it. Sporadic and localised acts were transformed into a racialised and hereditary theory of criminal behaviour that justified collective punishment and extensive surveillance. The Act functioned less as a criminal law than as a tool of social engineering designed to transform autonomous mobile populations into fixed and administratively manageable subjects.
Although the Criminal Tribes Act was ultimately repealed and the affected communities were gradually denotified between 1949 and 1952, the assumptions that underpinned it did not disappear. In India, repeal was accompanied by Habitual Offenders legislation that preserved many practices of surveillance under a different legal framework. In Pakistan, while the colonial legislation itself ceased to operate, many of the policing practices and social prejudices associated with it survived. The stigma attached to formerly notified communities often outlived the law by decades.
One of the most enduring legacies of this colonial project has been the persistence of Thana culture. Colonial policing was designed less to protect civil liberties than to monitor and discipline populations regarded as potentially troublesome. The police station became not merely a site of law enforcement but an institution of surveillance, coercion and social control. The Criminal Tribes Act represented the most extreme expression of this logic, placing entire communities under permanent suspicion and compelling them to report regularly to the authorities. Postcolonial states inherited much of this apparatus. Habitual offender laws, police dossiers, preventive detention measures and the routine targeting of marginalised groups reveal the continuing influence of colonial assumptions regarding suspect populations. The Thana remains, in many contexts, a symbol of discretionary authority where surveillance often precedes evidence and suspicion frequently substitutes for due process.
The deeper significance of the Criminal Tribes Act, therefore, lies in its contribution to a political culture in which state authority became intertwined with the regulation of movement, identity, and everyday life. Through its alliance with landed elites and its commitment to settled agrarian order, the colonial state transformed mobility into a marker of criminality and normalised extensive systems of surveillance. The Act was not merely a law directed against crime; it was part of a wider project to reorder society according to the requirements of colonial governance. Its legacy survives not only in the continuing marginalisation of denotified communities but also in institutional practices that continue to privilege control and order over freedom and autonomy.
Legally, the criminal tribe designation disappeared in Pakistan after independence, and these communities were no longer officially treated as hereditary criminals. But unlike India, there was no formal denotification movement or sustained state effort to address the historical injustice. As a result, while the law vanished, many of the social attitudes, policing practices, and economic disadvantages associated with the colonial classification continued to shape the lives of these communities. In many respects, they ceased to be “criminal tribes” in law, but they did not fully cease to be suspect populations in the eyes of local society and state institutions.
Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2026