Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India Author(s): Sandria B.

Freitag Reviewed work(s): Source: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 227-261 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/312511 . Accessed: 29/05/2012 05:50
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Modern Asian Studies 25, 2 (I99I),

pp. 227-261.

Printed in Great Britain.

Crimein theSocial Order NorthIndia' of Colonial

SANDRIA B. FREITAG The necessary vocabulary has not yet been created to encompass both the 'informing spirit' and 'whole social order' of British India.2 In part, at least, this is because research has generally concentrated on either British or Indian realms of action, rather than the interaction between them.3 But British colonial rule shaped a distinctive social system in India, one that drew on both British and indigenous values as well as notions of authority. This essay analyzes aspects of this colonial social order by focusing on its legal system, particularly that portion designed to deal with what the British identified as 'extraordinary' crime. Indeed, criminal law may be among the most revealing aspects of a social order. For, as Douglas Hay has observed for a similar elaboration of the English legal structure, 'criminal law is as much concerned with authority as it is with property .. . the connections between property, power and authority are close and crucial.'4
I am grateful for assistance in revising this paper to members of the Research Triangle South Asia Group (with whom an earlier draft was discussed in Raleigh during October, 1988); special thanks especially to David Gilmartin. I have also benefited richly from general discussions with my UC Berkeley students in a seminar on the use of criminality in social history given during the Fall semester, 1988; and from discussion at an SSRC-sponsored workshop on South Asian social history held at the Isle of Thorns, Sussex, in July 1989. I would also like to thank the agencies who have provided the funding for the larger project on which I am embarked, from which this article is drawn as a first attempt to understand the issues underlying criminality in the subcontinent. These agencies include the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies' Joint Committee on South Asia, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. 2 The terminology is Raymond Williams'. The Sociologyof Culture(New York: Studies of 'British realms of action' have included not only the institutions and praxis of British administrators themselves, but also those of a westernized Indian elite who operated through the institutions of rule established by the British. Studies of'Indian realms of action' have examined cultural and religious activities, as well as ethnographic constructions of Indian society. 4 Douglas Hay, 'Property, Authority and the Criminal Law' in Hay et al. (eds), in and Albion'sFatal Tree:Crime Society Eighteenth Century England(NY: Pantheon Books,
oo26-749X/9 I /$5.oo + .oo ? 1991 Cambridge University Press 227 Schocken Books, 1981), p. 13.
3

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In colonial India, the insistence on imperial authority had to be accomplished through structures shaped by constant interaction with the society the British ruled. It is the legal expression of this interaction, as much as the imperial ideology of rule, that is examined here. Because attitudes toward criminality are culture-bound and contextual, we can discover much about the social order of a particular place and time by looking at who formulates the definitions of crime, how control mechanisms are organized, and what priorities are assigned to different forms of crime. Equally important are changes in and the way such perceptions modify the operations of perceptions institutions. Recent studies on European criminality have existing suggested both a methodology and analytical framework with fascinating implications for this kind of study.5 The general line of argument developed particularly for England in this literature recognizes that the emerging legal structure became increasingly repressive of the poor, especially regarding property violations, during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it has been argued convincingly that the legal system 'worked' because everyone shared certain basic premises and assumptions that informed creation of the law as well as the actions of those who resisted it. In the words ofJ. A. Sharpe, the 'law was a cultural and ideological force so widely diffused in English society as to inform the notions and actions of the population at large.'6This 'force' has come to be referredto as 'the rule of law' both by analysts in retrospect and by participants at the time. By contrast, the legal system in colonial India was marked by the clashes of various indigenous assumptions and those of the imperial state. Certainly imperial contributions were not created in a vacuum. In the first place, they had to be implemented in a context inhabited by subjects with different cultural understandings-people who reshaped imperial policies to fit their own preconceptions and purposes. Equally important, although often overlooked, is the fact that policy-makers had to begin by acquiring their information from indigenous sources. Nor is it enough simply to say that imperial efforts
colonial criminal system, see footnote 16. 5 Our attention has been called to the subject by Michel Foucault, in works such as Disciplineand Punish. More to the point here, however, are studies that take into account not just the texts penned by the ruling class, but the context in which these texts were produced. See the seminal study by Hay et al. (eds), Albion'sFatal Tree,as in well as the more recent works by writers such as J. A. Sharpe, Crime EarlyModern
England i55o-750 (London: Longman, 1984) andJ. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courtsin 1975), p. 25. For discussion of the rather different treatment of property in the

England(Princeton University Press, 1986). 6 in England,p. 143. Sharpe, Crime EarlyModern

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became Indianized; historians must refine their focus by analyzing just who the players were in the interplay between Raj and ruled. For instance, as the Raj solidified its land revenue-based form of imperial state, British administrators used as their informants members of the elite stratum of landed society. The resulting system of legal values thus reflected an amalgam of sedentary South Asian values and British priorities. Yet the implications of this amalgam proved more complex than they may at first appear. First, British efforts to contain and domesticate the sedentary elite gave that elite a rather different character than it had previously possessed (although not entirely the one intended by the British).7 Second, this conservative agrarian elite formed an increasingly important core for the British construction of a social order-at the very point when challenges to agrarian-based cultural hegemony emerged from new, urban-based and, often, Western-educated claimants. Third, by definition, the very creation of this social order marginalized certain groups. The responses of marginalized groups, particularly in the way they chose which elements of their own cultural subsystems to alter and which to protect against the encroachments of an alien state, also formed an important component of the resulting social order. (More detailed discussions of these three elements follow.) In all of these ways, then, a variety of players influenced the creation and adjustments in the colonial Indian social order. None of this is to deny the importance in shaping legal institutions that the exercise of state authority represented. Key to this exercise was a fundamental distinction in the way the Raj treated what it perceived as crime committed by individuals ('ordinary crime') and that committed by collectivities ('extraordinary crime'). The narrative that follows examines the treatment of two such 'criminal' groupings-thags, the bandits immortalized by William H. Sleeman, and the so-called 'criminal tribe' of Sansiahs -in order to trace the elaboration of this distinction and its significance in the creation of a social order. Although the control mechanisms devoted to individual crime constituted the most visible sinews of the legal system, in fact the tactics used for collective crime reveal much more about the workings of the colonial Raj.
and the British Raj: NorthernIndia in the instance, T. R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords
7 This process of domestication has been the subject of several studies. See, for

Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, i979; Pamela Price, 'Resources and Rule in Zamindari South India, 1802-I903', PhD dissertation for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979; Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown (Cambridge University Press, 1988.).

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Authority and the Legal System Central to any social order, but especially crucial to an imperial system, must be perceptions of authority: who possesses it, and over what areas of life it may be exercised. (Indeed, one of the most significant elements of change in the ninteenth century was the slow alignment of indigenous and imperial definitions of authority.) When the colonial state's authority came to be implemented through emerging legal structures, it treated individual and collective crime quite differently. Elaboration of legal codes and police establishments to deal with individual crime conveyed the impression that 'the rule of law' had been introduced into British India;8yet the annual compilation of crime and police statistics makes clear the minimal state resources committed to policing individual crime. Unless such crime grew alarmingly in a short period, or its policing fell significantly short of what came to be seen as the norms of efficiency (for an inefficient force), the state did not reckon individual crime to be of great importance. By contrast, however, the British perceived collectively criminal actions to be either directed against, or weakening, the authority of the state. As a consequence, the British repeatedly felt the need to launch centralized police forces against 'extraordinary' crime and viewed their inefficacy as a measure of the Raj's impotence. This distinction in treatment of individuals and groups has been pointed out, in a related context, by David Washbrook.9He notes the ironic development of the British-Indian civil codes which, on the one hand, promoted economic development 'by emancipating the individual from the dead hand of the state ... and encouraging him to accumulate private wealth and property through the market' while, on the other hand, defining the 'bases of the "private" or "personal" law of their subjects' through limitations of 'the sphere of "free" activity by prescribing the moral and community obligations to which the individual was subject.' In this effort by the British to control the
8 See Arnold's discussion of 'colonialist writers like Sir Percival Griffiths' who 'equated the police with the "rule of law" and the "firm establishment of law and order" under the British.' David Arnold, PolicePowerand Colonial Rule: Madrasi85gI947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, I986), p. 3. Arnold is quoting from Griffiths, To Guard People:TheHistoryof theIndianPolice (London: I971), p. 2 -a My volume based primarily on reminiscences of members of the colonial police (the primary materials for this volume have been preserved in the India Office Library). 9 D. A. Washbrook, 'Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India', Modern

Asian Studies I5:3 ( I98):

649-72I.

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individual through the group, the Raj simultaneously effected the '" discovery" of existing customary and religious norms' (thus freezing in statute what had previously been an evolving social structure) and shaped these statutory expectations by the information received from elite members of indigenous society-particularly Hindu pandits and Muslim muftis. Washbrook points to the social ordering that resulted: 'with the support of British power, the Hindu [civil] law expanded its authority across large areas of society which had not known it before or which, for a very long period, had possessed their own more localized and non-scriptural customs.'"0 In a related development, the criminal code elaborated a legal structure for British India that looked much like that enacted for English society (although leaning more decisively toward the authoritarian than the libertarian side of Utilitarianism) -hence the reassuring appearance of 'the rule of law'. But alongside this overt, explicit legal structure (ostensibly geared to individuals) grew up an almost covert legal structure elaborated expressly to deal with collective crime (or groups of people behaving in ways defined by the state as anti-social and, hence, against the authority and interest of the state). 'Covert' in this case refers not so much to a secret system, as to an alternative structure whose importance was minimized by the implication that the elements of the structure were intended to be This alternative legal structure encompassed different court temporary. procedures, different definitions of acceptable evidence, even different punishments for particular crimes. The elaboration of separate and quite philosophically distinct structures for dealing with individuals and groups lies at the heart of our analysis. Its significance for the subsequent history of the subcontinent relates to two aspects. First, despite the elaboration of the trappings of 'the rule of law', the exercise of temporary central forces against collective crime preoccupied the imperial state for much of the nineteenth century. Second, the conflation of overt and covert legal structures underlies the treatment of political protest as crime (i.e. nationalism) in the mid-twentieth century and, we may suspect, since independence as well.
'0 Washbrook, ibid, pp. 652-3. We might also note that Washbrook's analysis goes some way toward explaining why only the civil law proved effective in protecting property in India. The major distinction one finds between the European studies of criminality and those of crime in a colonized area seems to be the lack of significant state commitment to protecting private property against criminal depredations. Laws wereenacted, but relatively few resourcesor policy concerns were directed to the issue. But that is the subject for another essay.

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Sedentarization, Banditry, and the Changing Social Order It is no historical accident that the first coordinated efforts to control collective crime occurred in the 83os. Using the provocative glimpses provided by C. A. Bayly,1 we may see this as a watershed decade. It marked, more clearly than any preceding military battles, the imposition of the British Raj on north India. The decade serves as well as a markerfor the emergence of a reformulatedindigenous social order. A primary characteristic of this new order was the adoption of previously 'royal' behavior-such as integrative participation in cultural activities and patronage of artisan production, as well as the assumption of revenue-collection responsibilities-by other Indians, particularly landed gentry and urban magnates (predominantly
merchants).12

Central to the eighteenth-century reformulation of the social order was an increasing willingness by such Indians to embrace British notions of authority, which acceded to these leaders cultural control and local patronage functions, while retaining for the state the right to promulgate a single definition of moral behavior.13 We have little direct documentation of the process by which British notions of authority became indigenized. As Douglas Hay has argued, however, an 'ideological structure' may be gauged not only by reference to key documents, but by analyzing the cumulative results, or 'product', of 'countless short-term decisions'.'4 One way to gauge the extent of these short-term decisions, then, is to look at the changes over the nineteenth century that led to a very different perception of bandits and other wandering groups. Critical in initiating changes in perceptions of peripatetic groups was the economic chaos of the I83os, induced by increasing product competition and cyclical weather instability, and accompanied by a 'crisis of the Indian political economy'. This crisis, resulting from a 'disturbance of the links between state, commerce and agrarian society', upset the system of
'' Rulers,Townsmen Bazaars:NorthIndianSociety theAgeof BritishExpansion, and in 177o1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I983). 12 See not only the extended discussion in Bayly of this theme as it relates to merchants, but also the examples of 'little kingdom' behavior of landed magnates provided by Pamela Price, Nicholas Dirks, Thomas Metcalf et al. 13 The implications of this division of function is explored in much greater detail in Actionand Community: PublicArenas theDevelopment Communalism and Freitag, Collective of in NorthIndia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 14 Hay et al. (eds), Albion'sFatal Tree,p. 53.

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coexistence established after 1740 between the British imperial structure and courtly service elites. Indeed, Bayly sees the I830s in north India as a 'conjunctural crisis' prompting in many Indians an attempt to return to the social systems obtaining in the late eighteenth century. Perhaps the strongest of these systems were the institutions of the 'criminal alternative society' -institutions that had survived because of their 'complex and disciplined organization'.15Not surprisingly, then, the incidence of banditry by organized, peripatetic groups rose dramatically in the I830s. The bandits known as 'thags' gained special prominence in British perceptions. Groups given the label 'thag' became readily identifiable under British usage, but defining the term with precision is more difficult. As Gordon has noted,'6 while thags became popularly identified as those who ritually strangled their robbery victims, the term seems to have been applied equally to many others who simply robbed and killed. Indeed, the special police force formed to wipe out thagi and dacoity treated as 'thags' people who poisoned their victims and even those who stole children. By implication-taking our cue from the reports and popular volumes produced by Thagi and Dacoity Police officers-we may functionally define the term thag to encompass robber bands whose organization was sustained over multiple years; who roamed across a wide geographical region; and whose crime-related rituals and belief systems were rooted in popular Hinduism,17 with a particular emphasis on worship of the goddess Kali."8Thus, as representatives of an alternative political and cultural structure, the thags stood as an important challenge to the exclusive authority of the British Raj over the Indian social order. The position of such groups in local agrarian society forms perhaps the most critical characteristic for our analytical purposes. Indeed, we may take the symbiosis of thag and landlord as the beginning point on the trajectory of change we wish to trace in this essay. Though they gathered together in gangs to roam across much of the subcontinent for three or four months of every year, thags spent the balance of the
15

Gordon, Thugs, Marauders, and State-formation in i8th Century Malwa', IndianEconomic SocialHistoryReview4 (December 1969). and 17 I have yet to analyze the actual relationship of this brief system to popular Hinduism; it has been suggested to me that key aspects seem to reflect widely-held beliefs and practices of lower caste villagers. 18 Although we must note that recruitment of individuals occurred frequently, and gangs often included a variety of caste and ethnic types. Nevertheless, some gang members could trace their thag connections back several generations.

Bayly, Rulers, Townsmenand Bazaars, pp. 265, 301, 295, 371, 318. 16 Stewart N. 'Scarf and Sword:

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year in their home villages, appearing to the outside world as ordinary peasants.19 Sleeman reflected the horror this prompted in British administrators when he recalled: While I was in the Civil charge of the district of Nursingpore ... no ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my becoming acquainted with it; nor was there a robber or a thief of the ordinary kind in the district, with whose character I had not become acquainted in the discharge of my duty as magistrate; and if any had then told me, that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village of Kandelee, not four hundred yards from my court, and that [in the] extensive groves of the village of Mandesur, only one stage from me ... was one of the largest ... places of murder in all India; and that large gangs from Hindustan and the Deccan used to rendezvous in these groves, remain in them for many days together every year, and carry their dreadful trade along all the lines of road that pass by and branch off them, with the knowledge and connivance of the two landholders by whose ancestors those groves had been planted, I should have thought him a fool or a mad man; and yet nothing could have been more true ..20 As the indignant phrase 'with the knowledge and connivance of the two landholders' suggests, among organized criminals the thags may have been the group most thoroughly embedded in local society. Indeed, administrators commonly complained that such men were almost impossible to root out under ordinary police procedures, for they were well camouflaged as local peasants. Their presence in a village benefited the large landholders, who reckoned their portion of booty as 'rent' for land supposedly worked by gang members. Local circulation of resources, in general, doubtless improved under their impact. Thags also functioned as a local strong-arm force for landlords, while providing protection to those within their area of influence, since they tolerated no other bandits operating where they lived. Such integration provides us with one indicator of how thags were viewed in the locality, though we must keep in mind that these were not necessarily 'social bandits' enjoying local support because they expressed commonly-held grievances against an elite world.21 But by those within their protected area, and by sheltering landlords, they must have been viewed as impressive and legitimate actors on
"9 See the files for the T & D in the National Archives, Home Dept; the Hervey reminiscences; and the various volumes by Sleeman on Thags, Budhuks, Megpunnaism (child theft), etc. 20 Sir or Used Henry William Sleeman, Ramaseeana, a Vocabulary thePeculiar of Language by Thugs... (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Military Orphan Press, 1836), pp. 32-3. 21 Regarding social banditry, it seems more likely that the real peasants who were neighbors to thag gang members suffered by having to work thag lands as well as their own. See the proud testimony of thags in Sleeman, Ramaseeana.

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the local stage. Indeed, their actions and martial values did not differ greatly from the martial exploits used by their landlords and local 'little kingdoms' to win control over recalcitrant villages and to best local competitors.22 In their integration into agrarian life, their use of popular Hindu rituals, and their valuation of martial exploits, then, thags fit well into the indigenous social order of the early nineteenth century. Moreover, the fact that the thags carried 'their dreadful trade along all the lines of road' provides another important indicator of the way they were popularly viewed. As Bayly reminds us, the land revenue-based state was only one form of political authority in operation before the nineteenth century. Only a few decades earlier, powerful wandering and/or predatory groups had expressed this power through plunder or by collecting tribute. In the I83os thags and other bandits were still close enough to such groups in time and mode of operation to look familiar. Thus no discontinuity marked thag behavior out from the organizing principles of sedentary society as it emerged from the eighteenth century. Nor was there any sense, yet, that the economic roles and social allure of wandering groups were irrelevant (and thence illegitimate) to the functioning of sedentary society. But this was the end of an era; in less than two decades the agrarian elite would begin to define this behavior as outside the norm. The change in values reflected by the changing social order related in part to the British redefinition of elite functions, in which martial valor was replaced by an ability to operate in law court and durbar.23The roles denied to landlords, by extension, robbed bandits as well of their previous cultural legitimacy. Moreover, the pressure induced by this change in values began to bear directly even on groups only marginally attached to sedentary society. Controlling Crime in the 1830s Not surprisingly, the British response to thags shared certain sentiments with that of the landed elite, although it encompassed a more complex array of attitudes. Certainly many administrators responded
Committed the Thug by See, for instance, W. H. Sleeman, Report the Depradations of Gangs(Calcutta I840) for discussion of landlord-thag relations. 23 See Price, 'Resources and Rule ...' for the cultural value of litigiousness for 'Little Kingdoms', and Bernard Cohn, 'Representing Authority in Victorian India' in the and Essays(Delhi: Oxford University Cohn, An Anthropologist Among Historians Other Press, I987) for discussion of the Durbar.
22

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to the hysterical cry that the existence of thags put the lie to British authority. Yet, paradoxically, such bandits also exercised a powerful appeal. Many agreed with the Thagi and Dacoity officer who noted that thags possessed 'nobility and chivalrous instincts ... [there were] specimens who in habitual courtliness and fair faith, were clothed with both dignity and manliness.'24The avid consumption of a number of melodramatic novels and articles, luridly picturing these thieves as they ritually murdered their victims, attests to their widespread appeal back in England.25 The viewpoints and historical experiences of imperial administrators and their landed informants thus reinforced each other. Thags might be 'criminals' who had to be stopped, but they were also seen as admirable and awesome opponents. Shared values and behavior made it possible to turn these opponents into allies; the methods developed for dealing with such 'criminals' by the Thagi and Dacoity Department reflected this strategy. For instance, Sleeman's sympathy with the heroic postures of thag leaders was played out in the informer-based system of evidence he created. Testimony from previously convicted thags came to serve as virtually irrefutable evidence to convict others in a gang; Sleeman thus concentrated on turning thag chiefs into his reliable informers. Dealing almost exclusively with these leaders, he singled out the most impressive, rewarding them by allowing their families and retainers to live near him in his compound. In some cases he apparently even directed chiefs into his police force. Indeed, the similarity between the spatial and psychological configurations of his compound and those of thaglandlord relations in a village is not coincidental. The infrastructure created to deal with thags marked an important alternative to the emerging legal structure designed for individual This alternative structure included not only a special, centralcrime.26 ized police force-the Thagi and Dacoity Department (or T & D)
24 25

General Charles Hervey, SomeRecords Crime... of

beingthe diary of ayear [1862]

See, for instance, C. Meadows Taylor, Confessions a Thug... This is not to argue of that more negative subconscious formulations did not underlie this treatment of the Indian 'Other'. But here I am focusing particularly on the more marked contrast between positive images evoked for thags and those created later in the century for 'criminal tribes'. 26 There were earlier, more limited, experiments that set the pattern for the Thagi and Dacoity infrastructure-particularly in Bengal. An informer system bearing some similarity to this had also been developed in England. See Freitag, 'Collective Crime and Authority' in Yang (ed.), Crimeand Criminality BritishIndia (Tucson: in University of Arizona Press, 1985).

(London: 1892), Vol. I, p. 27.

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special treatment in court, and special techniques of investigation. The creation of the T & D proved important as the first extraprovincial attempt at control through policing, providing a model for future efforts and pioneering a significant new method for imposing on Indian society the British Raj's notions of authority. Another accommodation was the judicial finding that although a particular gang had to be proved to have committed a particular crime, it was then sufficient to prove that an accused man belonged to the gang, not that he committed a specific crime. Under the British Raj, then, first priority in this alternative legal structure was assigned neither to matters of prevention and protection for those being ruled, nor to safeguards for those pursued, accused and convicted: the usual characteristics of a 'rule of law' were not the point in an imperial social order. Instead, what mattered was a convincing demonstration of the strength and capacity of British authority, as exercised over groups of criminals. The contrast between the overt 'rule of law' and the covertly developing structure to control groups may best be illustrated by contrasting the results of two investigations into thag gangs. First, thag approvers Dojja and Devi Din describe the aftermath to a T & D campaign led by Messieurs Stockwell and Perry prior to the establishment of either the T & D or special judicial proceedings: -but Dojja: ... Stockwell and Perry Sahibs scraped together some two hundred of us at Mynporee, but a Daer Saer Sahib Judge of Circuit] came from Bareilly, and released all for whom the zamindars [large landholders] would give security. The twenty who could not get it were retained. Devi Din: Yes, I remember. Mr. Stockwell and Perry went down in the same buggy to the Sahib and told him that they had secured us at much cost and but trouble, and that we were all asil, thorough-bred Thugs; he said it would not do to keep us upon mere general report, particularly if the zamindars would vouch for us. He went to Calcutta, and six months after came back and caused us all to be released, by an order from the Sudur, except eighteen.27 This may be contrasted with proceedings from Trial no. 5 of the Calendar for the Court of Sessions of Zellah Ghazeepor of August 1833: The fate of Purdil Khan and Buddhaie [the two victims], and the circumstances attending the robbery are detailed in the evidence of Karim Ali alone
[No author] TheThugsorPhansigars India,comprising history theriseandprogress a of of documents of that extraordinay fraternityof assassins... compiledfrom originaland authentic by published CaptainW. H. Sleeman (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1839), vol. II, p. 23: emphasis in the original. (Apparently this is an American abridgment of Sleeman's Ramaseeana perhaps with extracts from other Sleeman volumes. My thanks to Tony Stewart for finding this volume for me.)
27

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... [described earlier as 'An accomplice to whom, under the provisions of Section III, Regulation X, 1824, a pardon was tendered by the magistrates']. The evidence of Karim Ali presented several peculiar circumstances, each susceptible of independent proof, and upon the truth of which the credit due to the evidence would mainly depend, such as the finding of the sword, the dagger, the pieces of box and appendages, and the bodies in the places indicated by Karim Ali. The Magistrate at once observed the importance of investigating these points, and lost no time in deputing the Darogah of the jail, an active and intelligent officer, to make these investigations, accompanied by Karim Ali. The result of this inquiry substantiating more or less the above points I shall now detail from the evidence examined before this court.28 Administrative concern to establish the credibility of the approver Karim Ali is clear in this proceeding. Certainly the judge is convinced: Respecting the guilt of the prisoners, I do not see any reasonable doubt to be urged in their favour; the evidence of an accomplice whose very act of deserting and denouncing his companions is one of treachery dictated by the desire of self-preservation is ever viewed with suspicion; but in the present case, the evidence of Karim Ali would scarcely be necessary to substantiate their guilt, for there would still remain a mass of proof sufficient to convict the prisoners.... [Nevertheless,] we may add [the evidence of the box, sword, dagger, etc.] to the proofs already obtained when Karim Ali made his disclosure. All these are facts [only] elicited from the evidence of Karim Ali, which, while they tend greatly to strengthen the proofs against the prisoners in question, undoubtedly show, if well considered, that the evidence of Karim Ali may be depended on as truth, an opinion to which the evidence of the prosecution, corroborating the details of that evidence in other respects lends additional weight.29 That is, a new structure of 'evidence' is being elaborated for 'extrawho had partiordinary' crime. The testimony of an approver-one in the exploits of the gang and thus was fully culpable-had to cipated be 'proved' through the recovery of certain physical evidence. (Fully aware that those who served as witnesses in their alien legal system could not be presumed to embrace the fundamental values implicit in the system, the British placed greatest emphasis on physical evidence.) Once this independent physical 'proof had been
28

and box were found,but not the bodies. 29 in of Ibid,pp. 133-4.As ShahidAminhas noted,the full implication the approver the crime committed, and his ability to add telling 'facts' with corroborating 'evidence' werecriticalelementsin winningapprover status.'Approver's Testimony, Judicial Discourse:The Case of ChauriChaura',in RanajitGuha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V.

Ibid, pp. 125, 124, 128. The 'more or less' refers to the fact that the sword, dagger

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established, the approver's testimony was considered irrefutable. On the grounds of such approver testimony, both the specific crimes associated with each gang, and the identity of members of the gang, would be established. Thus the approver system of informers constituted the central strategy in Sleeman's arsenal. Previously-convicted thags received suspension of their sentences in return for testimony identifying other members of their gang and detailing the crimes committed by the gang. Often this was the only direct evidence against accused thags, with the T & D using corroborative evidence of even insignificant details to 'prove' its veracity. Although this is not the place to analyze closely the approver system itself, or the profound implications it carried for future law enforcement in British India, we must note its impact in aligning indigenous perceptions with imperial ones. As Shahid Amin has demonstrated so convincingly, by its very nature the imperial formula of approver's testimony structured the form and content of 'knowledge' about what constituted criminality.30It set up not only definitions of acceptable and unacceptable bahavior, but also a particular mode for ordering this information that came to influence general perceptions of crime: the court cases were necessarily constructed into a narrative that identified a beginning and ending and isolated out the actions and relationships considered significant. Since we have little independent evidence to check against the narratives produced for the courts by the T & D, it is less difficult to uncover this process of definition and ordering by looking instead at the other documents Sleeman produced. Key among these are his and 'dictionary of thug argot' the Ramaseeana, the texts he reproduced of his 'Conversations with thugs' on subjects that did not become incorporated into the dictionary. Even leaving aside often glaring cultural dissonances from the translations, Sleeman's very emphasis is revealing. Exotic 'superstitious' practices and beliefs (e.g. dozens of omens and ceremonies) predominate in the dictionary;31other topics encompassed by the argot include the hierarchy within thag bands (based on experience and expertise), names of different bands, and terms for items and practices common to the practice of dissembling
30 Shahid Amin, ibid. It is important to note that Amin's analysis is about a much matured form of approver testimony, adapted for use against nationalists, and thus all of his arguments would not hold for this initial form of the mode. Nevertheless, his general analysis provides many sophisticated insights. 31 And became perpetuated. See discussion, below, on the late nineteenth century rediscovery of 'ethnographic evidence' regarding Thag belief systems.

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to disarm a potential victim. The first conversation from the volume suggests how Sleeman gathered this (and only this) information: Q[uestion from Sleeman] -Do you ever recollect any misfortune arising from going on when a hare crossed the road before you? [An example is given] Q-And you think these signs are all mandates from the deity, and if properly attended to, no harm can befall you? Nasir-Certainly; no one doubts it; ask anybody. How could Thugs have otherwise prospered? Have they not everywhere been protected as long as they have attended religiously to their rules? Q-But if there was such a deity as Bhowani,and she were your patroness, how could she allow me and others to seize and punish so many Thugs? Nasir- I have a hundred times heard my father and other old and wise men say, when we had killed a sweeper and otherwise infringed their rules, that we should be some day punished for it; that the European rulers would be made the instruments to chastise us for our disregard of omens, and neglect of the rules laid down for our guidance. This conversation was repeated with minor variations over and over again. Another version ended with Sleeman's passionate reply to a thag who commented, 'God knows in what it will all end.' True, God only knows; but we hope it will end in the entire suppression of this wicked and foolish system; and in the conviction yourpart that Devi has on really had nothing to do with it.32 The programs and publications of the T & D, that is, were aimed not only at a British audience, but at an indigenous one as well. Activities of the Thagi and Dacoity department thus represented a significant point of pressure in forcing the alignment of indigenous and imperial definitions of crime. Even as the Raj's treatment of thags reinforced indigenous values such as martial valor and a hierarchy dominated by a landed elite, new standards emerged regarding appropriate behavior for that indigenous elite and a definition of crime that marginalized the activities of certain groups. Meanwhile, although the British administration created a new method of suppression, they tempered it with techniques at least related to those employed by their indigenous informants. Indeed, face-to-face contact between thag chiefs and the top officers of the T & D, sometimes softened the repressive measures initiated to control crime. Yet, the very familiarity of these techniques camouflaged a significant reshaping of colonial interaction. Important changes linked new notions of criminality to the process of sedentarization and accompanying urbanization. Rural landlords slowly embraced this system as they
32

Sleeman, Ramaseeana, pp.

141-2,

187 (emphasis added).

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concentrated on maintaining their hold on the portion of exclusive authority delegated to them by the Raj, and on exercising the cultural patronage the Raj had abandoned to them.33 As a consequence, a very different perception of banditry emerged after the i86os. Statistics trace a dramatic decrease in the number of gangs operating in British India. Significantly, it was only along borders with princely states that bandit gangs continued to operate successfully. The British, of course, used this fact to argue that their 'civilizing' state was morally superior to that of the princes. It suggests, as well, however, that practical and cultural alternatives to plunder had been created under British rule, not least steady employment in the Company's army and the expansion of cultivation. Perhaps for this reason, the statistics may also gauge the extent to which the locally powerful landed elite in British India had come to view the phenomenon of banditry much as the British did.34 Collective Crime in the i88os The reinterpreted and reshaped social order that emerged by the late nineteenth century revolved around a sedentary, agrarian base. Landlords as rural allies became ever more important, however, because the attention of the imperial state was being drawn increasingly to the cities. We may speculate that it was the ideological challenge presented by a newly emerging Western-educated elite, and the alternative social and political structures of the cities, that prompted the last intensive efforts to define collective criminality in a way that demonstrated the state's ability to control large numbers of people-while, at the same time, lending credence and legitimacy to the value system of a now-domesticated landed elite. As the values of the agrarian elite came to inform the social order of late nineteenth-century north India, groups still operating outside this base, particularly those relying on a peripatetic lifestyle and the values that implied, became increasingly marginalized. Suffering social, economic and, hence, political irrelevance, these groups now
33 The non-crime related ramifications of this cultural division of labor are explored in more detail in Freitag, Collective Actionand Community: PublicArenasandtheDevelopmentof Communalism NorthIndia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). in 34 See, for instance, FromSepoyto Subedar for both observations on the peace and prosperity brought by the British and, through implication, of the elaboration of alternative employment for those who might have taken up some form of banditry in the i8th century.

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became criminalized at the hands of a state power possessing the capacity to reach deep into Indian society. The groups now attracting administrative attention were seen as neither 'noble' nor 'chivalrous', but abnormal and threatening. Mobile and without local roots in sedentary society, they could not be readily identified or controlled by the landed elite. Indeed, what had once been a symbiotic if uneasy relationship between settled and wandering peoples, between plains and hills groups, became cultural warfare.35In particular, the ability of outsiders to move freely and to do only those tasks that appealed to them, rather than those that defined their place in local society, engendered profound mistrust. How these outsiders were perceived owed much to the procedures by which administrators, acting as amateur social scientists cataloguing their subjects, had collected, organized and presented information. To a large extent this process is invisible, cloaked by the academic trappings of footnotes that trace a scholarly silsilah back to volumes penned by earlier administrators. Yet it is not only earlier administrators who must be seen as sources.36As the Raj expansively set about cataloguing its subject peoples, it turned to trusted Indian intermediaries for information about Indian society. Although the subject merits close and detailed analysis, two examples of this process will suffice. In his introduction to William Crooke's recently of reprinted Glossary NorthIndianPeasantLife, Shahid Amin traces the between Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke, thus relationship capturing a key example of the inter-related processes by which British decisions over whatto emphasize were given their substance by the social preoccupations and prejudices of their indigenous informants. Indeed, the insights culled and forwarded by Ram Gharib Chaube, a long-time assistant to Crooke, might well stand in for a catalogue of the worldview of the landed elite in north India.37
35 See Edith Branstedter, 'Human Sacrifice and British-Kond Relations, I759I862' and Stewart Gordon, 'Bhils and the Idea of a Criminal Tribe in Nineteenth and in Century India' in Yang (ed.), Crime Criminality BritishIndia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press for AAS Monograph Series No. XLII, I985). 36 Among the most frequently cited is H. M. Eliot. We may take as representative his handwritten notes; most revealing are citations such as the following, which punctuate his encyclopedia on Indian groups: 'Mohur Sing, a very intelligent man of - - says that there are 96 gotras of Togas and I6oo of Gaurs of Hariana'. Thus the process of selection by the British was twofold-in terms of both the subject matter and the informants deemed reliable-but, nevertheless, ultimately had to rely on the information provided by the elite stratum with which such administrators interacted. 37 Shahid Amin, 'Introduction', to William Crooke, A Glossary NorthIndianPeasant of Life (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also Chaube's contributions to North IndianNotesand Queries the end of the nineteenth century. at

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Similarly, the background to the entries on thags in the I890s volumes of Crooke's North Indian Notes and Queriesmay stand for another part of this process, by which the ethnographic information collected by earlier administrators was selected and reshaped by later writers for rather different purposes. In the case of the thags, that process had several incarnations. We have noted that Sleeman collected and presented in the early I83os his 'conversations' with thag leaders in two forms-as a 'dictionary' to be used by administrators encountering particular pieces of vocabulary, and as a set of relatively complete conversations that ranged rather widely over the experiences and beliefs of the thags. While Sleeman certainly had structured these volumes to accomplish his own purposes, they did not remain the definitive word on thags for long. Before the end of that same decade, Edwarde Thornton had rearranged this information for more popular consumption, providing separate chapters on the history of thagi, the variety of forms of thagi, examples of the religious beliefs and superstitions of the thags, omens, and then a series of 'stories' about the exploits of the different gangs. By 1891, it was this onevolume work, with its ethnography already preselected and organized, on which Crooke drew for a series of entries on thag omens sprinkled throughout Volume I of North Indian Notes and Queries.38 Nestled as they were between entries describing the folktales of Hoshiapur and the treatment of Banjara husbands, such snippets on the thags rendered them as ethnographic curiosities to be scrutinized and catalogued and hence, controlled. By the late nineteenth century, then, control was exercised not only through the explicit workings of special police forces brought to bear on 'extraordinary' crime, but also through knowledge, particularly the pseudo-scientific descriptions of group activities and beliefs. It was this knowledge that came to be utilized through the alternative structure of law to justify 'extraordinary' measures. To this extent, many of the cultural prejudices displayed by the imperial government against the groups it now saw as 'criminal' had been inherited from their indigenous informants, and then legitimized as scholarship in such referencevolumes as Crooke's Tribes Castes Northwestern and India. of How this process worked may be demonstrated by the series of legal stratagems and structures created by the Raj to deal with the so-called 'criminal tribes'.39The Criminal Tribes Act, No. XXVII of 1871, set
38 Edwarde Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (London: William H. Allen & Co., 1837); IO L& R SV 248, North Indian Notes and Queries, vol. I (1891-92). 39 See especially, Anand Y. Yang, 'Dangerous Castes and Tribes: The Criminal

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up a structure that commenced with the province applying to the Governor General to proclaim a tribe as 'criminal'. Key to initiating the process of proclamation was administrative identification of a group as criminal, which had to be based on documentation constructed laboriously (from anecdotal evidence provided by indigenous informants, to which were joined partial statistics to establish the criminal tendencies of the group). Citations of similar characteristics then permitted clusters of people (who called themselves by a variety of names) to be classified as members of the same group. We may take as typical the following descriptions compiled during the process leading to proclamation of the Sansiahs as a criminal tribe: The reports ... leave no doubt that the Sansiahs as a tribe are addicted to the systematic commission of crime against property of the non-bailable class, frequently attended by violence and even murder.40 They all intermarry and join in the commission of crime [even though] the names they go by differ ... in different localities; thus they are known as
Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doms of Northeast India', in Yang (ed.), Crimeand Criminality, 89-107; David Arnold, '"Criminal Tribes" and "Martial Races": pp. Crime and Social Control in Colonial India', paper presented to Seminar on comparative Commonwealth Social History, University of London, I984; Sandria B. Freitag, 'Collective Crime and Social Engineering: The Treatment of Criminal Tribes in Nineteenth Century British India', paper presented to the annual Midwestern Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin, November 1982. The thagi precedent proved all-important in providing certain leaps of legal logic that could be called upon when designing the Criminal Tribes Act, which provided not only for a process whereby the crimes of a few could be cited to establish the guilt of many, but which also stipulated the need to specify the administrative remedies to be adopted by the provincial government (these ranged from registration and surveillance to incarceration in colonies). Despite the structural continuity with the innovations introduced by the Thagi and Dacoity Department, and the rhetorical links made by administrators between the thags and the criminal tribes, the law nevertheless conveyed the impression that these were intermittent strategies designed to deal with problems that arose sporadically. In part the very 'P.R.' generated by Sleeman required this approach, for he had conveyed the impression that the British Raj had 'solved' the problem of thags, and thus the criminal tribes had to be seen as a new problem. In part it also related to the uneasiness of those concerned to replicate the English 'rule of law' in India; these opponents, located in both the administration and the judiciary, had resisted attempts in the 185os and i86os to categorize and deal with entire groups of people as criminal. Such a system did triumph in the I87os, as the NWP, Oudh, and Punjab governments pushed to define groups as criminal by reference to their caste identity-a legal characterization that rendered 'crime' a genetically transmitted trait that could be adduced for collectivities of people. But more than genetics was used in this definition; this essay suggests the importance of space and place in shaping the relationship between state and community in British India. 40 Letter from J. Woodburn, Chief Secy to Govt, NWP & 0, to Secy to the GO I, Home Dept, dated Allahabad, 17 December 1889, p. 2. IOR. L/P&J/6/291 (file 2250
of 1890).

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Chandu-Sansiahs and Bans-Sansiahs in Aligarh, as Gidhias in Meerut, as Kanjars and Gidhias in Muzaffarnagar, as Rudhua Kanjars in Muttra and in Baratpur and some other Native States; they are in some cases spoken of as Beriahs in Etah and Mainpuri, as Bhatus in Moradabad, and as Ghurkals inJeypur .. .41[He goes on to note that an appendix] shows the crimes which have occurred in the last five years, and sufficiently proves that the habits of the class are, if anything, getting worse rather than better. [Information from other districts, while less complete provides enough evidence] to show that the habits of the Sansiahs are universally criminal. In Muttra, seven of these people were in I86I convicted of a dakaiti ... 23 others were convicted of receiving stolen property and of vagrancy; in 1872, II were committed to Sessions for the commission of a dakaiti . . . Appendix E shows that out of 320 persons, 8i have been convicted.... Of one thing, however, I am convinced, i.e., that no partial measures will be successful; a close connection is kept up by the Sansiahs in all parts of the Province: it is not uncommon for members of a gang who have got into trouble to leave their usual associates and to join another Girdh at a distance; and at least four large camps of refuge are kept up ... Here Sansiahs flock in great numbers; their marriages are arranged, and persons guilty of crime are enabled to sink their identity for a time. This sufficiently proves that the measures adopted should be universal.42 The burden here, of course, was simply to establish that a group of people existed and that some members of the group had committed crimes. The jump from these two points to the conclusion that the group thus was proved to be collectively criminal was not unprecedented: we have seen that special trial procedures had been developed for thags in the I83os based precisely on this logic.43 But much of the inherent ring of legitimacy of such characterizations resulted from the fact that these groups came from the bottom of an existing indigenous hierarchy that the colonial state reinforced. The I941 census, for instance, identified nineteen tribes/castes as 'dhoomkku jatiyan', i.e. 'mobile castes who do not lead a settled life, 41 Letter from Colonel A. of Ollivant, Senior Deputy Inspector-General Police, NWP & 0, to Personal Asst.to the Inspector-General Police,NWP & 0, dated27 of terization may be notedfromOllivant'sfollowing point,whenhe asks:'The question now arisesunderwhatnamewe shouldin futurereportsspeakof thesepeople?' After of detailingdifficulties,he suggests that because Aligarh is the headquarters the groupand in that area they are knownas Sansiahs,and because'Mr. Warburton's havegivensomenotoriety the name... it is betterto adhereto the titleof to inquiries Sansiahs.' It is not possible from these records to gauge the accuracy of the administration's opinionthat for all practical did, purposes,thesesubgroups indeed, a constitute singlecommunity. 42
43 Ibid., pp. 3, 6.

February 1887, L/P&J/6/291, file 2250 of I890, p. i. The arbitrariness of the charac-

Crime Criminality, I40-64. and pp.

See S. Freitag,'Collective Crimeand Authorityin North India', in Yang (ed.),

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continuously moving from place to place'. As Bhagwan Das Kela noted in I950, these groups are also known as 'aprudhi', i.e. those whose occupation is crime.44The groups enumerated in I941 often served as the subjects of folktales and proverbs as well, such as the Bhojpuri proverb that 'Ahirs, Gadiriyas, Pasis, tino satyanasi' ('Ahirs, Gadiriyas and Pasis create havoc'). It is significant, too, that many of these peripatetic groups had internalized the sedentary hierarchical ordering and value system, at least to the extent that many of their origin myths 'explain' their marginality. The Haburas, for instance, recount that their ancestors killed a rabbit in front of Sita's wife, who then cursed them to beg.45 It was not, however, merely the overlap of British pseudo-scientific distinctions with indigenous hierarchies that marked the social order of British India. More important, what we have termed a court or alternative legal structure, predicated as it was on methods designed to control groups subjects, became the power center of the exercise of of imperial authority (in contradistinction to the supposed 'rule of law' which treated other criminals as individuals). The history and treatment by the Raj of the 'criminal tribe' of Sansiahs provides a useful case to illustrate this point in the evolution of the late imperial social
order.46

Sansiahs were viewed as being among the very worst offenders against agrarian society in the eyes of sedentary Indians and British administrators alike. They were characterized as 'irreclaimable'; observers said they lived on plunder gained through widespread wandering and displayed 'absolute repugnance to honest labour of any kind.' They were 'ruthless in the destruction of human life', committing 'violence and even murder wantonly, when they can do so with impunity'; but were also 'cowardly except when in overpowering numbers'. Sansiah women were considered 'almost as bad as the
men'.47 They were condemned as a 'criminal tribe' deserving of the

special treatment created for such groups in the i87os. What precisely did this label 'criminal tribe' mean? For our
Bhagwan Das Kela, Humari AdishJatiyan,1950. Bhagwan Das Kela, ibid. Thanks to Sanjay Sharma for providing several proverbs: personal communication, February 7, 1987. 46 Treatment of the Sansiahs seems to have been strikingly typical. See Stuart Blackburn's reconstruction of the similar history of the South Indian Kallars, 'The Kallars: A Tamil "Criminal Tribe" Reconsidered', South Asia 1978, pp. 38-49. 47 Descriptions of Sansiahs in a letter from the Inspector General of Police to Chief Secretary NWP & O. IOR. NWP & O Police Proceedings for 1891, vol. 3839, April
45

44

A proceedings no. 34-42.

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purposes we may simply note that the administrative understanding of concepts like 'caste' and 'tribe' (often used interchangeably, particularly for peripatetic groups) had been built up over many decades;48 by the i87os administrators invoked this form of identity as simultaneously genetic and cultural. While the basic information came from indigenous informants, it had been reshaped in very important ways by European intellectual fads. Pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism proved the most prominent influence, explaining criminality in genetic terms,49 accompanied by such trappings as the 'anthropometrical' measurement of criminals by the police.50 As an attitude connecting genetics and social ranking it doubtless reached its apogee in H. H. Risley's assertion that 'it is scarcely a paradox to lay down, as a law of the caste organization, that the social status of the numbers of a particular group varies in inverse ratio to the mean relative width of the nose .. ..51 Lombroso may have been the most prominent practitioner applying Social Darwinism to criminality. He may also have taken the approach to its most extreme, but the implications he explored are very revealing. Gould notes that Lombroso concluded that about 40% of criminals followed hereditary compulsion; others acted from passion, rage, or desperation. At first glance, this distinction of occasional from born criminals has the appearance of a compromise or retreat, but Lombroso used it in an opposite way-as a claim that rendered his system immune to disproof. No longer could men be characterized by their acts. Murder might be a deed of the lowest ape in human body or of the most upright cuckold overcome by justified rage.52 Among the first legislative products in India of this intellectual climate was the concept of 'criminal tribe', elaborated by the Government of India especially for use by the UP provincial government.53 Those who could be recognized as a collectively criminal group were 'proclaimed' through a series of legal steps leading ultimately to their
48 For the profound implications of the concept of'tribe' as invented and invoked by the Punjab provincial government, see David Gilmartin, Empire Islam (Berkeley: and University of California Press, 1988), chapter one. 49 See the full discussion in A. Yang, 'The Making of a Criminal Tribe', in Yang and (ed.), Crime Criminality. 50 See B proceedings for December I90o, U.P. Police for Proceedings abolition of this system. The implications of anthropometry are discussed in detail in Steven Jay Gould, TheMismeasure Man (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., I98I). of 51 H. H. Risley, ThePeople India. of 52 Gould, TheMismeasure Man, p. 132. of 53 Why the provincial governments of U P, Punjab and Bombay used this legislation so much more heavily than did the other areas of British India is a question well worth exploring in greater detail.

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being considered 'criminals' whether or not they had, as individuals, committed a crime. As we have seen, the so-called 'evidence' used to support this designation included the view of the 'tribe' in local folklore (that is, its relationship with settled society), opinions of district magistrates and police chiefs, and the frequency of arrests (not necessarily convictions) enacted against 'tribe' members. Significantly, this evidence related not only to the general public view that these groups committed 'crimes', but also to the fact that they wandered, that they were not tied to specific places within sedentary society. Many of the definitions proffered by colonial administrators linked Sansiah criminality to their movement. Writers referred, often in the same sentences, to the Sansiahs' propensity to crime and to their nomadism: The Sansiahs of these Provinces are the hereditary robbers of Upper India. They are a wandering tribe, moving in gangs from one part of the country to another, and detaching parties from their camps, whose method is usually a rapid series of daring robberies at a distance from their head-quarters. Under the orders of the Lieutenant-Governor a careful census of the Sansiahs has been made. They number in all 4,190, of whom 1,217 are adult males, and at the time of the census more than a third of their whole number were concentrated in the Saharanpur district. Their camps are nomadic, and the census was followed by general movements, which have materially altered their distribution in the districts they ordinarily frequent.54 The Aligarh Sansiahs, so often referred to, are by far the most dangerous of the criminal tribes. They are absolute nomads, men, women, and children wandering at will; but certain families commonly frequent particular districts ... The mass of the Sansiahs infinitely prefer their roaming life, and they will not relinquish it unless driven to do so by hard necessity. They [with few exceptions] ... make no pretence of following any trade or industry whatever, and live solely by the proceeds of their crimes.55 Collective criminality, then, was characterized not only by ostensibly genetic traits, but also in part by its distance from sedentary society. (This was a distance that could be defined, rather literally, in spatial terms, as these observations suggest.) As was generally true of the development of the alternative legal system that existed in shadow to the 'rule of law', the impulses that informed definitions of collective cannot be characterized: criminality were, they simply simultaneously, pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism, pragmatic 'seatof-the-pants' observations and prejudices of local administrators, and received wisdom from those among the sedentary elite whom the
54 Letter from J. Woodburn (see note 40).

55 Colonel Ollivant (see note 41), pp. i, 6.

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British would have as allies. Amalgamating these sources, administrators created definitions that then served as the basis for labeling groups of people as criminals. After proclamation, any member found outside the specified territory was subject to imprisonment without trial. In this process the government assigned legal status to public opinion (as held by a certain stratum of local society), and created a series of legal maneuvers based on that opinion without regard for the niceties of civil rights.56Once again, an alternative legal structure emerged that, though camouflaged within the 'rule of law', focused on the Raj's exercise of authority over the behavior of groups. In good 'scientific' fashion, the provincial government sought statistical support for the public opinion of the Sansiahs that led to their proclamation. During the late I88os the Census Commissioner was instructed to survey the Sansiah population, in order to provide information that could be used in the legal declaration that they constituted a 'criminal tribe'. He found 4190 'professional wandering criminals of this class', but another 4200 persons bearing the caste name who were 'settled and harmless'. Further complications included the fact that this 'caste' went by other names as well, and that the use of 'aliases' was not consistent from district to district. Though the Census Commissioner recommended wording that would 'proclaim all "Sansiahs", including all Kanjars, Gidhias, Beriahs and Bhatus known to intermarry with the Sansiahs, join in their wanderings or associate with them in their camps,' the Lt-Governor balked at putting so many thousands of people on the rolls as congenital criminals. Instead, the I887 proclamation was limited to Sansiahs resident only in those four districts considered the worst (Muzaffanagar, Meerut, Muthra and Aligarh), and to a small number of 'alias'named groups.57As we shall see, even this decision was fraught with disaster. Those so proclaimed were rounded up (whether or not they had committed a crime), and divided into three groups. The ones con56 It is important to note that the British were unwilling to exercise this control without putting in place the legal structure to make it appear that this 'covert' mechanism was, indeed, part of the rule of law. See, for instance, the documents in which the overzealous local officer suffered severe condemnation by the provincial government when he attempted to invent criminal tribe controls prior to creation of the Act. IOL. P/235/vol. 53A, NWP Police progs dated I2 August I865, index no. 7,

57 Muzaffanagar:Gidhias, Kanjars; Meerut: Gidhias; Muthra: Radhua Kanjurs; no alias groups in Aligarh.

progs no. 24 & 25; index no 12, progs nos 2 & 3.

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sidered least harmful were 'planted out' with local zamindars, who were held responsible for their good behavior-in the process, ensuring local leaders' control over potentially troublesome elements in the countryside. Children under the age of 18 were put into a new reformatory established at Fatehgarh just for Sansiahs. Those remaining, considered hardcore criminal types, were confined in a new penal colony established at Sultanpur. There they stayed for almost a decade, until a visit to the colony by a new Lt-Governor led him to protest the underlying assumption of the law that the inmates--most of whom had never committed a crime-could be incarcerated indefinitely. Social Engineering to Reinforce the Colonial Social Order The Lieutenant-Governor's protest crystallized a new spirit gaining momentum within the provincial administration. While Social Darwinism had provided the initial impetus to the 'Criminal Tribe' legislation, the following decade witnessed the emergence of a crusading zeal for reclaiming these 'criminal' souls. Administrative and cultural self-confidence expressed itself in assorted attempts at social engineering, culminating in an agricultural colony at Kheri. For our purposes, these reclamation projects provide revealing clues to the new shape of colonial social order characteristic of British India at the end of the nineteenth century. Once again, it is an order marked by the imperial state's attempt to subsume individuals within groups, and then enforce the approved hierarchy on such groups as a form of control. The details of these policies of social engineering are so fascinating in their absurdity that they tempt us to a long digression.58Even in outline, we still must touch briefly on the various elements of the policy: the colonial government wanted to address simultaneously the reclamation of existing Sansiah children, prevention of the reproduction of more genetically criminal children through control of Sansiah women, and the integration (albeit at the bottom of the social heap) into sedentary society of marginalized Sansiah male adults. Administrators began by separating Sansiah children from their parents, and subjecting them to the 'education and refining
58

See, for instance, Freitag, 'Collective Crime and Social Engineering' (see note

39).

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influences'59of the Fatehgarh Reformatory. This solution, however, posed another problem in its wake: what was to be done with these Sansiahs once they were no longer children, and could be considered as successfully reformed products of the reformatory? Few seem to have been released during the decade their parents were confined at Sultanpur; but B proceedings describe some who were treated as Sansiahs outside their proclaimed territory, and therefore imprisoned for breaking the law. Administrative uneasiness at this approach may be divined from the fact that the provincial government abolished the reformatorywhen it established the agricultural colony at Kheri. The reformatory, it argued, had been accomplished by 'a curious wrenching of the law'. Fatehgarh rules were of'extremely doubtful authority' and 'curiously hazy': these had specified that no one above the age of 18 was to be retained, but had made no provisions for discharging anyone. Moreover, juveniles from 'planted out' families had also been retained there, though this was recognized as 'palpably illegal'.60This uneasiness suggests that the superficial legitimacy conveyed by the 'rule of law' imposed certain constraints on the operation of an alternative legal apparatus to maintain control. The Government of India, too, challenged the provincial government for closing the reformatory, insisting that it had not provided opportunities for a full discussion of the implications of this act before shutting the reformatorydown. The colonial social order, then, was one within which-whatever the pragmatic necessities of running an empire-certain trappings of process and legal structure proved important in justifying rule. An even more elaborate undertaking dealt with the problem of future generations of Sansiahs. This required nothing less than that the provincial government enter the marriage broker business. The administrators' concern was to ensure that women in the penal settlement did not mate with the male Sansiahs who surrounded them. (Here the government had to ignore the characterization that 'the women were almost as bad as the men.' Instead, the females became shadowy figures who-though known by their first names to district magistrates searching through the province for suitable mates-functioned simply to pass on more or less criminal genes.) To decriminalize Sansiah genes meant providing alternate husband
59 The phrase is used later for another such reformatory at Chunar. UP State Archives. File no. 283 of 1914. Printed as U P Government Police Proceedings nos 3 & 4, March 1915. 60 UP State Archives, File 796 for 1901, Box 5, Police Dept NWP & O. Progs for April i897, nos 29-97.

SANDRIA B. FREITAG 252 material: district officers obligingly compiled lists of eligible bachelors from among the 'planted out' Sansiahs. Since some onus attached to having been locked up in the penal settlement at Sultanpur or in the Fatehgarh reformatory, the government soon found itself having to provide dowries as well as husbands for these brides. But after clearing these two hurdles, the matchmaking business boomed. We may speculate that much of this success related to Sansiah preference for exogamy. That the Sansiahs themselves failed to see the ultimate goal cherished by the provincial government seems apparent from the petitions the government received from malesat Sultanpur asking for brides from outside-something the government had no interest in providing.6' Indeed, dealing with Sansiah women and children led to programs with contradictory philosophical underpinnings: in the one case the government acted as though Sansiah criminality could be reformed, and in the other it assumed that criminality was genetically transmitted. Yet what mattered to this colonial social order was not so much contradictory rationales, as end results that subjugated certain peoples to the authority and single moral code espoused by the imperial state. By the early i89os the government had also begun experimenting with reclamation schemes for adult Sansiahs. The first was an ingenious if small-scale program to send family units to various cities, where they would be used as sweepers in municipal jails and 'lunatic asylums'.62Petitions from Sansiahs and terse reports from municipal commissioners suggest how this 'reclamation'-that is, the reshaping of a rural wandering spirit into an urban sweeper-affected many of its subjects. Sansiah families were characterized as 'unwilling to work at Lucknow and do the work only because they are compelled to. In Allahabad they are said to have done well but have suffered in health and are troubled with superstitious fears'. (The local administrator put it graphically: 'At night sometimes they cry out under the imagination that they are troubled by evil spirits. They are anxious to get back to Sultanpur.') Some Sansiahs bowed to their lot and made a success of it, but the 1896 petition from one such family makes clear what they thought of their assignment, when they pointed out that See, for example, UP Police B Progs for April 1891 no. 13; January 1892, no 28; and July 1893, no. 22. 62 These families were taken from the prison settlement at Sultanpur, and were replaced in the settlement by 'planted out' families. This round-robin of 'criminal' bodies surely contradicted the original distinction between 'more' and 'less' dangerous Sansiahs.
61

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they had served their 'sentence' in good faith, and now begged to be 'released' and sent to the new agricultural settlement at Kheri.63 This last request placed the basic assumptions of reclamation policies in sharp relief. Kheri, to which the sweeper Sansiahs aspired, was the large-scale reclamation settlement developed as home for all criminal Sansiahs. But those Sansiahs earlier recycled into urban sweepers were no longer considered by the government to be in need of reclamation. Their metamorphosis complete, their request was refused. The records later tell us that the family exercised its only remaining recourse and absconded. With the establishment of the agricultural settlement at Kheri, the provincial administration moved into large-scale social engineering. Planners intended to make Kheri a very different place from Sultanpur: the latter 'was difficult to distinguish from a prison', while Kheri was to be a 'place of residence', parallel to the lifestyle of Sansiahs 'planted out' to zamindars and thus integrated into rural life. The Sansiahs themselves were to build a kind of village, putting up their own huts and the settlement walls. Each would receive two bighas mixed good and bad land, bullocks, ploughs, and seed grain; they were then to work the land and live off the proceeds. An optimistic tone permeates this initial description: 'The Sansiahs will be encouraged to keep pigs and fowls and a police guard will be stationed at the colony. A hospital assistant with a proper supply of medicines will be appointed. Shops for the sale of necessaries will be established and a school will be maintained to continue the education of the children commenced at Fatehgarh.'64 If the atmosphere differed, simplified rules did not alter substantively from Sutanpur to Kheri: legitimacy still meant fitting within government-imposed boundaries and constraints on behavior. Any Sansiah leaving the settlement without permission was subject to arrest. No spirits or intoxicating drugs were permitted. The special officer in charge (stipulated to be a 'native' administrator) was given first class magistrate powers so that he would have 'authority to whip, which [was to] be the one effective punishment for serious breaches of the rules.'65 Vacillation between optimistic hopes for reclamation, and pessimistic provisions for punishment, characterized these I89os efforts at
63 UP State Archives. Home Police. Box 58 I. File no. 715A. Notes & Orders. 'Settlements of the Sansiahs'. 64 Note byJ. J. D. LaTouche, dated 9-4-96, ibid. 65

Note by Secretary to Lt-Governor, dated I4-5-96, ibid.

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social engineering, and illuminates the effort to control marginal peoples through integration into the social order. On the one hand, the Lt-Governor had 'decided that it was inexpedient to retain the Sansiahs indefinitely within [the] four walls [of Sultanpur].' His optimistic view emphasized that 'during the last five years they have been under discipline, and have to a certain extent acquired habits of industry and have been taught agriculture' or, to put it differently, been schooled in the value system and virtues of agrarian society. On the other hand, the Judicial Undersecretary pleaded for new and precise rules to regulate Kheri, for the government was 'assuming the grave responsibility of settling down hundreds of Sansiahs near the Nepal frontier without providing [itself] with the legal authority to control them.' Moreover, the 'ferocity of Sansiahs [had been] brought to the notice of the Government of India' just the previous year, and the statistics constantly reiterated 'the tendency of Sansiahs to abscond.' Integration into the social order had to be hedged about by force in the service of the exclusive authority of the empire. Certainly fears about successful integration were not unfounded. To ensure Sansiah cooperation required more than physical coercion. A report from the officer overseeing the building of Kheri, for instance, reported that 'there has been some difficulty about making Sansiahs work, and some trouble over the grain. They objected to grinding it.' Convincing members of the surrounding society proved equally difficult. In 1897 the officer in charge of the Sansiah settlement at Kheri reported, with a mixture of pique and embarrassment, that 234 of the inmates had just absconded. The abscondings could be traced to the heavy-handedness of local police who, faced with a crime committed nearby, automatically assumed that the newly-settled criminal tribesmen were guilty. As the police charged into the settlement, Sansiahs fled in panic into the surrounding forest.66 Towards a Twentieth Century Social Order Faced with the sheepish report of a 75% attrition rate at the muchlauded Kheri settlement, provincial administrators carefully reexamined the records. What they found lampooned both the colonial
For full documentation of this event, see IOR. NWP & O. Provincial Police Proceedings for 1897, vol. 5136 for February, April, July, August and November. The 'Notes' kept with these printed proceedings are located in the U P State Archives, File 796C for 19II, Box 5, Police Department NWP & O Progs for April 1897, nos 29-97.
66

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categorizations of their subjects, and its methods of dealing with them. It also, however, reveals much about the process of creating and implementing a colonial social order. Where the i83os were marked by efforts to adjust indigenous perceptions of authority to fit British priorities, the debate on Sansiahs late in the century highlights a significant effort to adjust the colonial structure: efforts were made not only to reflect the indigenous signifying system of a rural elite, but also to bring the power of the state to bear on behalf of an elite which, itself, was rapidly becoming marginalized. The Kheri officer's reference to absconding 'Bherias, Nats and Bhatus' prompted a rereading of the records. Since the request to include these groups as nominal Sansiahs had been refused in 1887, their presence at Kheri understandably puzzled the administration. Investigators discovered that district officers had made few such fine distinctions when rounding up those they thought of as criminal tribesmen. Nor had they worried overmuch about whether a group behaving 'criminally' in one district consistently did so in the next, and thus fit the wording of the proclamation. All were fair game if perceived by the surrounding society as members of a Sansiah gang during a 'sweep'.67This was not, however, the most devastating discovery-at least in terms of revealing the imperial 'rule of law' in operation. The wording of the original proclamation had prompted a basic confusion, by specifically calling for arrests of those Sansiahs in resident the four districts at the time. Yet 'it was all along reported that the Criminal Sansiahs wandered and never remained in one district, a fact emphasized by the figures for Muzaffarnargar [where the Census listed 55 Sansiahs; a local officer found 65I in I890; and the total number arrested under the proclamation was 529] . .'. Regardless, then, of the elaborate distinctions made in the proclamations, in the event arresting officers followed their own instincts and, no doubt, the guidance of local notables pursuing their own ends. Put simply, 'what happened was that certain gangs found within the limits of the four districts on a certain date were seized.' Such a practice, far removed from the theoretical musings of Social Darwinism or Utilitarianism, laid bare the actual dynamics of the colonial system at work. In the first place, since no overfine examination of genetic inheritance was made in these gang sweeps, 'these gangs no doubt included Bhatus from Moradabad and Bareilly and Beriahs from Etah and Mainpuri [that is, non-proclaimed castes from
ibid.
67 See note from F. C. d'M. dated 19-1-97, and Note to Secy from R. G., same date,

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non-proclaimed districts]; also some wretched Nats who from the very first were excluded from consideration.' But, in the second place, the odds were very high that those arrested were more likely to be local, settled agriculturalist Sansiahs rather than wandering ones. The experience of Kumbha Sansiah puts the case starkly. He had been rounded up in I894, imprisoned in Sultanpur, and then sent to the subsidiaryjail at Ballia to be a sweeper. After patiently working there for several years, he asked to be allowed to return to his village in Muzaffarnagar-so that he might again take up cultivation of his seven bighas of land! Investigating his claim, the Inspector-General of Prisons had to admit that 'it is not known if these Sansiahs belong to the proclaimed classes as none of their names appear in the printed list of the tribe.'68 Thus, though the province had begun arresting people because they were genetically criminal, frequently those swept up neither had possessed the proper genetic background, nor had they behaved in a criminal manner. For those like Kumbha Sansiah the irony was strong: he was being 'reclaimed' to 2 bighas inside a criminal settlement, after being removed from 7 bighas in his own village. Wandering Sansiahs found the new lifestyle equally unappealing, as it now limited them to a confined space and forced them to do tasks they considered demeaning. That even the most liberal of these schemes proved unappealing to wandering Sansiahs is attested by the fact that most Sansiahs 'planted out' in 1890 had absconded within six years.69 Indeed, the figures suggest that those remaining inside government agricultural settlements, rather than the marginalized 'criminals' they'd been painted to be, constituted the poorest and most powerless of sedentary society in the countryside-at least some of whom apparently reckoned they were better off inside than they had been outside the settlement's boundaries, and so remained. But the sedentary elite benefited most from the scheme, for disruptive peripatetic people had been controlled within (if not physically removed from) the countryside, while support of some of the poorest inhabitants had been taken over by the government. Those who remained had been put under the control of the landlords themselves. The government, too, benefited. Criminal Tribe legislation enabled
on these embarrassing grounds, but because Kumbha's place as sweeper had been taken by a Dom (member of another 'criminal tribe'), and the support the district was now paying Kumbha's extended family was reckoned a 'dead loss to the state'. 69 Letter from Under Secretary (udicial), dated 6-4-96, ibid., p. 3.
68 Letter from IG Prisons dated i I-10-97, ibid. In the end, approval was given not

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the provincial government to rationalize its rule through the concrete actions it took to maintain peace in the countryside. Moreover, in the face of increasing dissatisfaction in the cities and among the newly emerging educated elite, the government had created allies among the landed elite in the countryside. The interaction that characterized the social order at the turn of the century clearly defined those considered legitimate within the system. Reclamation-indeed, social engineering in general-proved to be an activity too immense in scale and intense in resource allocation to be viewed favorably for long. The demands it levied on the province must have appeared overwhelming to a government whose commitment (to the concept of a police establishment or to the principles of incarceration as punishment) remained minimal. Not surprisingly, then, enthusiasm for Kheri waned within the decade, and the UP government turned the reclamation business over to the new 'professionals' in the field. New settlements, established under the auspices of the Salvation Army, addressed the state's short-term problem of legally dealing with 'criminals' who had neither committed a crime nor possessed criminal genes. The degree of success attendant on this widesweeping social engineering is of some interest. There is certainly evidence that some Sansiahs conformed to the expectations of the provincial government; for them, the settlement at Kheri proved appealing, as an increasing number of petitions from Sansiahs for entrance to the colony suggests. Whether this was because the government achieved real changes in behavior and worldview, or because the Sansiahs engaged in a process of self-selection (through abscondings and petitions for admission) is not completely clear, though the evidence more strongly suggests the latter explanation. But indicators also point to the implication that the settlement became a new focus for sustaining the old way of life for many unproclaimed but wandering Sansiahs outside the settlements (a group that came to be called, in official parlance, 'outside Sansiahs'). In ironic ways, then, the state's attempt to create a confined and delimited place for Sansiahs served, instead, to provide a new locus for the wideranging use of space through which 'outside' Sansiahs continued to roam. Indeed, the use made of Kheri by other Sansiahs suggests just how problematic was this stratagem of the state. In 1912, for instance, 74
petitioners
(21

to Kheri on the basis of their relationships to settlers already resident. This process of petition and admission is revealing for several reasons,

men, 19 women, 20 boys, and 14 girls) were admitted

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not least being the state's ongoing effort to encompass extended family units within the group they had defined for Sansiahs. Since in many cases the relationships involved marriage ties in some way, it suggests as well the continuing contacts and interaction between settlers and Sansiahs located outside the settlement: an interaction, we may surmise, typical of general Sansiah interaction before the advent of the Criminal Tribes Act, as well. Also of interest are the occupations listed under 'remarks' in the table prepared by the manager of the settlement. Three groups are listed as 'farmers' (and for them the table also notes their property, including buffaloes, cows, bulls and goats): this suggests that settled Sansiahs saw the agricultural settlement as a viable alternative to their agrarian existence, especially if kinship ties connected them to Kheri. But the majority are characterized as having 'no occupation' or 'living by begging'70 -an indication that many Sansiahs continued to operate at the margins of settled society, as they had before. For a group originally numbered in the I88os at some 9,000 souls (however inaccurate the identification process and count may have been), then, the official practice of incorporating a few hundred of them in an enclosed space had not greatly altered the process of internal differentiation among all those within the putative community of Sansiahs. Official preoccupation with 'outside' Sansiahs in the first decades of the new century was prompted by the presence of several large 'gangs' of Sansiahs near Kheri, who used the area as a base. In the aggregate, they totalled more than the Sansiahs inside the Kheri settlement; many of them had been identified as engaged in criminal activity; yet none were proclaimed or, therefore, appropriately labelled by government nomenclature as 'criminals'. The irony of this situation--in which Sansiahs proclaimed and contained within the settlement could be treated as criminals, while those outside (and therefore free to commit crimes) could not, was not lost on the provincial administration. In 1913, for instance, a discussion between the provincial government and a local administrator noted that 'the Sahibganj [Kheri] people give very little or no trouble, but they are tame Sansiahs, [while] the Sansiahs who have so far not come into the settlements are a very bad lot indeed. [The local administrator] is strongly in favor of the wild Sansiahs of Kheri being sent to another district.' Emerging documents from this conversation made the following points relevant to our understanding of ongoing differentiation among
70 I OR. P/89o3. UP Police Progs for November I912, progs no 7, serial no. 28, p. 4.

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place for the

Sansiahs:

'Kheri ...

is not altogether

a suitable

establishment of a[nother] settlement [in which to enclose] the outside Sansiahs, a term which is applied to the Sansiahs and other tribes
who do not belong to the Sahibganj colony .. .'; 'clearly these "out-

side" Sansiahs are a tough lot and will tax all the ability of the Salvation Army if they undertake to deal with them. The total number is between 480-500, of whom
132

are said to be adult males.

Nearly all the adults, including the women, seem to be badmashes living by theft, dacoity, or hiring themselves out as lathiyals to any zamindar who needs their services. For agriculture they seem to have a strong aversion.' The administrators all agreed that this kind of influence was very problematic for the 'tame' Sansiahs of Kheri-who had, nevertheless, obviously functioned as a magnet for drawing other Sansiahs to the area. 'The Sansiahs are a standing nuisance in Kheri ... The position at Kheri is intolerable.'71 That is, the provincial administration seems to have been faced in 1912 with a situation in which the relationship between 'wandering' and 'settled' Sansiahs continued much as it had three decades earlier. The only difference now was that the settled Sansiahs resided inside settlements run by the Salvation Army. This is not, for our purposes, a large difference. It does suggest rather significant limits on the success of social engineering, for it may not be, as scholars once thought, that wanderers were changed into 'settled' agriculturalists by the Criminal Tribe policy-only that those members of the community who already had a propensity to be settled, had established themselves not under a zamindar but under the Salvation Army/provincial government. And it suggests, as well, that the new area in which the settled Sansiahs were resident continued to serve as the hub to which the wandering Sansiahs returned from their forays, and in which they all met for the marriage season. Conclusion Thus the use of reclamation settlements, and even the presence of the Salvation Army, created short-term solutions of sorts. Yet the admininstration still faced a long-term problem. With the countryside essentially pacified, it had to devise a new strategy both for defining criminality (vis-a-vis its own authority), and for dealing with those
U P State Archives, file no. 68 of 19 i . Printed Police A Proceedings forJuly I91 3, no. I I8-62 (pp. 15-38); June I915, pp. 49-57; November 1915, pp. 39-40.
71

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groups it labelled 'criminal' that could be transferred to the new challenges it faced in the cities. The language of the revised Criminal Tribe Act of 19I i reflected the imperial refocus from the countryside to the urban landscape. Though the fictional label of 'tribe' was retained, the groups who could be proclaimed and imprisoned without establishing individual guilt now included any collection of persons- that is, 'gang'--who had engaged over time in premeditated collective crime. The legislation makes it clear that all pretence at defining criminality on a genetic or social basis had been abandoned, and that the procedure of 'proclamation' was retained purely for its administrative convenience in repressing and controlling collective criminal activity. What had begun as a pseudo-scientific way to define criminality while controlling large groups, ended as a bureaucratic short-cut around civil protections. The implications for control of popular protest are there, as well. That these implications were significant stems from the ultimate conflation in British India of the two legal structures, the 'rule of law' for individuals and its ostensibly temporary alternative for 'groups'. By the 1920o it had become very difficult to distinguish between the two, though the diametrically opposed state goals of dealing with individuals and dealing with groups should have presented a conundrum. Under the mantle of exclusive authority, the colonial state melded together the notion of a modern state's direct relationship with its individual citizen, and the colonial state's reliance on a hierarchy of groups to deal with its subjects. The resulting social order may well have been uniquely colonial in character. Although the British Raj justified this conflation through reference to the need to control the relatively organized activities of urban gundas (ruffians) in drugs and gambling (and, ultimately, communal strife), a more obvious application of the conflated structures emerged during the nationalist movement. Perhaps the most striking point made by Shahid Amin in his study of the use of approver testimony to convict Chauri Chaura rioters in 1922 may serve to conclude this study. Despite the historian's recognition of the Chauri Chaura incident as a telling commentary on the discontinuity between Gandhi's own rhetoric and the use the lower classes made of him,72 the British Raj devoted much time and energy to establishing that the
In this case, by using his visit to the area as the rallying point for an attack on a police thana in which some 200 rioters killed the local officers. See especially Shahid Amin, 'Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, I92I-2' in Guha III. Studies (ed.), Subaltern
72

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Chauri Chaura incident was not a political act, but crime pure and simple. Significantly, the state's case rested to an astonishing degree on the tacit recognition that only the poor and powerless were involved. The Committing Magistrate's reference to 'the mob of untouchable volunteers' resonated with Judge Piggott's own predilections. the judge later argued in his memoirs that it was futile to treat this mob of deluded peasants as 'rebels' and impolitic to dignify their riot by forming indictments for such high-sounding offences as 'waging war against the King' . . . The only alternative was to deal with the offenders as ordinary criminals, and to employ against them the cumbrous machinery of the ordinary law.73 In fact, of course, no 'ordinary law' could be invoked here. As Amin notes, 'this is perhaps the place to remind ourselves that "approver" is not a juridical category at all: it belongs to the vocabulary of the police and the prosecution. The term occurs nowhere in the Law of Evidence, not even in the index to the authoritative digest on it. The Evidence Act talks about "witnesses" of whom "the accomplice" is one. The meaning of the term "accomplice" is at least clear, but with
what is the noun "approver" connected
.
..

?74 As this analysis

has

shown, the noun 'approver' is clearly connected to what had been an alternative structure of law designed to deal with 'extraordinary' crime. It was now being used to render a particular crime mundane and ordinary. In the process by which the overt and covert legal structures became conflated, one important characteristic remained constant. The law continued to buttress a colonial social order designed to reinforce those at the top of the hierarchy of groups who agreed to embrace the moral norms supported by the colonial state.
73

Quoted in Amin, 'Approver's Testimony, Judicial discourse', pp. 19 , 199. 74 Ibid., p. 186.