Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India

Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India
Author: Henry Schwarz
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781405120579

Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India provides a detailed overview of the phenomenon of the criminal tribe in India from the early days of colonial rule to the present. Tracing and analyzing historical debates in historiography, anthropology, and criminology, Henry Schwarz argues that crime in the colonial context is used as much to control subject populations as to define morally repugnant behavior. Crime thus becomes the foil of political legitimacy under military conquest. By the end of British rule in India, almost two hundred tribes had been criminalized, comprising four million people. Today some sixty million people still labor under the stigma of this criminal inheritance. In this new study, Schwarz explores the popular movement that has arisen to reverse this discrimination, producing a radical culture that contests stereotypes to reclaim humanity.

Law and Imperialism

Law and Imperialism
Author: Preeti Nijhar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2015-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317315995

Laws that were imposed by colonizers were as much an attempt to confirm their own identity as to control the more dangerous elements of a potentially unruly populace. This title uses material from both British Parliamentary Papers and colonial archive material to provide evidence of legal change and response.

Dishonoured by History

Dishonoured by History
Author: Meena Radhakrishna
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9788125020905

This book explores how colonial policies converted itinerant groups on the one hand into a source of cheap labour and on the other into a category known as criminal tribes . It also examines missionary activity especially the Salvation Army, in the Madras Presidency in the nineteenth century.

Castes of Mind

Castes of Mind
Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011-10-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400840945

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Denotified Tribes of India

Denotified Tribes of India
Author: Malli Gandhi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000028054

Social stigmatization is a virtual curse imposed on certain Indian social sections by the colonial government as part of their contextual political strategies by late nineteenth century. The so-called denotified tribes (formerly known as ex-criminal tribes) in Indian society occupy this state-made category. According to the latest survey reports, India has 198 groups belonging to nomadic and denotified tribes: unorganized, scattered and utter nobodies. Social justice is alien to them and economic disempowerment eventually resulted in slavery, bonded labour and poverty. Public welfare measures pay scant attention to the issue of reform and rehabilitation of these sections and, they are made to suffer from an identity crisis today. Most of these communities are split under reserved categories: Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes. The work tries to present a narrative detailing the conditions of denotified tribes during colonial and post-colonial India. And the undeclared wish in doing so is to seek the attention of those in policy-making and decision-making bodies under the Indian government. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India

Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India
Author: Henry Schwarz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2010-02-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1444317342

Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India provides a detailed overview of the phenomenon of the “criminal tribe” in India from the early days of colonial rule to the present. Traces and analyzes historical debates in historiography, anthropology and criminology Argues that crime in the colonial context is used as much to control subject populations as to define morally repugnant behavior Explores how crime evolved as the foil of political legitimacy under military Examines the popular movement that has arisen to reverse the discrimination against the millions of people laboring under the stigma of criminal inheritance, producing a radical culture that contests stereotypes to reclaim their humanity

Crooked Stalks

Crooked Stalks
Author: Anand Pandian
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2009-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822391015

How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste—classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a “criminal tribe”—Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today. In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.

The New Punitiveness

The New Punitiveness
Author: John Pratt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134018622

Throughout much of the western world more and more people are being sent to prison, one of a number of changes inspired by a 'new punitiveness' in penal and political affairs. This book seeks to understand these developments, bringing together leading authorities in the field to provide a wide-ranging analysis of new penal trends, compare the development of differing patterns of punishment across different types of societies, and to provide a range of theoretical analyses and commentaries to help understand their significance. As well as increases in imprisonment this book is also concerned to address a number of other aspects of 'the new punitiveness': firstly, the return of a number of forms of punishment previously thought extinct or inappropriate, such as the return of shaming punishments and chain gangs (in parts of the USA); and secondly, the increasing public involvement in penal affairs and penal development, for example in relation to length of sentences and the California Three Strikes Law, and a growing accreditation of the rights of victims. The book will be essential reading for students seeking to understand trends and theories of punishment on law, criminology, penology and other courses.

A Despotism of Law

A Despotism of Law
Author: Radhika Singha
Publisher:
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2000
Genre: Crime
ISBN:

This volume deals with law-making as a cultural enterprise in which the colonial state had to draw upon existing normative codes of rank, status and gender, and re-order them to a new and more exclusive definition of the state's sovereign right.