Book Reviews : MEENA RADHAKRISHNA, Dishonoured by History? Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2001, pp. 192

Abstract

particularly oppressive piece of colonial legislation, the ’Criminal Tribes Act’ (CTA) of 1911. While the first law of this kind had been enacted four decades earlier, the 1911 Act was significant in that it further facilitated the notification of ’criminal tribes’ by authorising local officials to register members of itinerant communities and their relatives summarily, without any legal procedure, as ’hereditary criminals’ . Moreover, the act extended ’criminal tribes’ legislation for the first time to the Madras Presidency. Radhakrishna’s study focuses specifically on implications of the CTA for the South Indian Koravar, Yerukula and Koracha communities whose traditional subsistence strategies (namely itinerant salt and grain trade) had progressively failed them after the mid-nineteenth century due to the introduction of railways, investment in roads and colonial revenue policies. Contextualising the debate on ’criminal tribes’ in the wider Victorian discourse on ’crime’, the author points out that British administrators in India laid far less emphasis on eugenic than on sociological ’explanations’ of crime. Hence nomadic communities were deemed to be criminal not because of their genetic disposition, but rather due to ’irrational’ habits (e.g., allegedly ’aimless wandering’), ‘immoral’ customs (e.g., easy divorce) and to a loss of traditional means of subsistence. ’Criminal tribes’, therefore, required civilisational effort, i.e., education backed up by coercion, and this was what the CTAs were intended to provide a legal framework for. Koravars, Yerukulas and Korachas, like other nomadic communities, had combined itinerant trade with other economic activities such as cattle breeding and the production of bamboo items. Yet when pack bullocks were increasingly replaced by carts and railways, when itinerant traders were sidelined by merchant firms, the colonial administration concluded that these communities had lost all ’visible sources of income’ and were, therefore, bound to take to crime. This was