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Introduction
In British India, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw numerous colonial projects to prohibit gendered cultural practices that ‘oppressed’ Indian women and girls—including sati (widow-burning), female infanticide, and child marriage—often in alliance with elite Indian reformers.1 Yet gender structured the colonial governance of Indian society in broader and more mundane ways than these extensively studied and ideologically charged projects of woman ‘rescue’ might suggest. Indian women and men's everyday interactions with the laws, institutions, and agents of the colonial state were structured by gender power relations, plural Indian and British gender norms, and varied expectations around domesticity and intimacy.
This article explores the gender patterns of local colonial governance through a study of Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), which targeted diverse, socially marginalized communities whom the British categorized as ‘criminal tribes’ or hereditary criminals by caste occupation.2 The marginality of these criminalized groups varied: for instance, some groups were marginal to sedentary societies, while others had extremely low caste status. In the North-Western Provinces (NWP, now Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand) in the 1870s and 1880s, the primary aim of Part I of the CTA was to restrict the movements of the so-called criminal tribes and, through sedentarization, to compel them to adopt cultivation or other ‘industrious’ work.3 People from communities that were proclaimed as criminal tribes had their names and details recorded on police registers, were subjected to a daily head count, and could not leave their villages without permission.4
Between 1871 and 1890, the NWP government did not closely regulate criminalized communities’ marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or gendered organization of labour, though later decades would see such projects. Nevertheless, in this early period, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities, in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis.5 Meanwhile,...