The limits of the ethnographic state in British India: The case of ‘foreign Asiatic vagrants’, c. 1860–1900

Abstract

This article looks afresh at the notion of the British–Indian colonial state as an ‘ethnographic state’, as formulated by Nicholas Dirks. It does so through a case study of gangs of ‘foreign Asiatic vagrants’ whose forays into British India during the last decades of the nineteenth century created panic among colonial officials and further argues that such panic was due to the difficulty of identifying the members of these gangs. Ethnography proved of little help in the process, as the people involved did not easily fit into the disciplinary grid of colonial ethnography, with its preference for settled communities neatly divided into discrete castes over semi-nomadic groups with shifting habits and habitats. The resulting uncertainties translated themselves into a kind of bureaucratic anarchy, as various officials took different views of the nature and composition of these groups. Eventually, their mobilities were controlled through police measures, with no significant contribution from ethnographic knowledge.