Introduction

This penultimate chapter focuses on the social and the legal construction of the low castes and tribes in colonial Punjab as ‘criminal’. That process replicates, in several ways, the experience of the English criminal class of Victorian England. Firstly, this chapter outlines the immediate social history of this process. The earlier experience with the dacoits and the thugs represented a learning process for lawmakers and for enforcement agents in India in the development of the legal construction of the criminal. The major agents were colonial police officers operating with wide, expanding, and discretionary powers, under the pragmatic mandate of inquisitorial law. Other actors played a part. In India, it incorporated the fears and anxieties of upper-caste groups, merging in a generic view of the criminal tribes, while drawing on previous East India Company legislation.

Successively, the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 legislation is detailed, outlining its discretionary attributes. However, the major aim of the chapter is to furnish a case study of the Sansi as representative of the larger body of criminal tribes and castes. The Sansi were subject to a similar defining process as the English criminal class. They were criminalized as a collectivity in terms of their ‘inherited’ characters and in their traditional survival practices. The criminalization of the Sansi was the result of two general factors: firstly, there were benefits to Empire in the way that reciprocal identities between ‘superiors’ and ‘inferiors’ were constructed, so that the local upper-caste groups were assimilated further into the web of imperial control;