Mobility, control and criminality in early colonial India, 1760s–1850s

Abstract

The article looks into the ways certain mobile groups like the banjaras, gosains, fakirs and sanyasis were ‘criminalised’ by the colonial state between the periods of the 1760s and 1850s. Historiographically, the article argues for looking at the early colonial period more closely than has hitherto been done to understand the changing material and circulatory regimes in which these peripatetic groups operated. Unlike the current historiographical convention, which would explain crime as the artefact of a paranoid colonial mind-set, this article traces criminality to the disruption in prevailing patterns of trade and transport, and the livelihoods supported by them, consequent to colonial settlement and, in this region (eastern India), the rise of the kingdom of Nepal.