Since the 1870s, various pieces of colonial legislation in India during British rule were collectively called the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA). Such legislations criminalised entire communities by designating them and their members as habitual criminals.
The first CTA, the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, was applied mostly in North India, before it was extended to the Bengal Presidency and other areas in 1876, and updated to the Criminal Tribes Act 1911, which included the Madras Presidency. The Act went through several amendments in the next decade, and, finally, the 1924 version incorporated all of them.
At the time of Indian independence in 1947, thirteen million people in 127 communities were subject to the legislation. They were subject to compulsory registration and a pass system which limited their movement and where they could reside. The Criminal Tribes Act 1924 was repealed in August 1949 and former "criminal tribes" were denotified in 1952, when the Act was replaced with the Habitual Offenders Act 1952. In 1961 state governments started releasing lists of such tribes.
Today, there are 313 Nomadic Tribes and 198 Denotified Tribes of India who continue to face its legacy through continued alienation and stereotyping with the policing and judicial systems and media portrayal.
Terming entire communities as criminals, barbarians, vagabond, or thieves is rooted in Indian caste discrimination. Anthropologist Anastasia Piliavsky argues that the stereotype of 'criminal tribes' has a deep history and predates colonial legislation in India. She adds,
the hypnotism of this bias [colonial construct of criminal tribes] is extraordinary and leaves scores of learned and talented historians tone-deaf to voices that were there before, during, and after the Europeans reached, and quit the subcontinent.
Ancient and medieval literature from the Indian subcontinent have mentions of outlawed tribes. These include the Vedic Aranyaka, epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, ancient and medieval storytelling of Katha, dramas, and Jataka tales. In these texts, roads, mountain passes, and forest pathways are teemed with robber bands waiting to prey on merchants and travellers. They come from the forests, which are at the periphery of civilisation in Brahmanic cosmology. They are at 'the cosmic fringe, the wasteland, a socially negative space home to various outsiders to ordinary moral, ritual, legal, and social life.' Sage Manu wrote of them as living outside the village, wearing garments of the dead, eating their food from broken dishes, and wandering from place to place. Historian Divya Cherian in her eighteenth-century history of the Kingdom of Marwar reiterates the precolonial roots of 'criminal tribes.' The erstwhile Rathor state attributed an inherent tendency towards animal killing and crimes of Thori and Bavris communities. Archival records show the anxiety of Rathor administrators who viewed these communities as inclined to steal and raid villages. While other communities in the kingdom also engaged in raiding, they were not classified as inherently criminal. Therefore, Cherian argues that it was 'a complex of factors—landlessness, poverty, and the resultant martial weakness—in addition to a hereditary association with theft that led to a caste's perception as criminal.'
Piliavsky also summarises these as socio-political decisions with varied purposes, prior to colonial legislations and subsequent list-making,
Authors of ancient treatises, Mughal rulers, European travellers in precolonial India, and itinerant groups (today and in the past) all called on the idea of hereditary robber tribes to pursue a wide range of distinctive purposes. Nevertheless, colonial rule advanced these stereotypes of congenital criminality to cement vertical power relations. In addition, contemporary discourse of crime in Britain also influenced perception and response in the larger colonies like India; class and caste seemed to converge in legal discourse and legislations in India.
Professor Henry Schwarz notes that, as early as 1772, under the governorship of Warren Hastings, legal regulations allowed for punishment of an offender's family and village. It was rooted in the contemporary jurisprudence that criminality was hereditary in India and criminals were such by profession and belonged to like-minded fraternity. The growth of gang robbery by lowland villagers in the late eighteenth century was significantly due to the Cornwallis administrative reforms rather than changes in the economic production patters. The reforms altered land revenue obligations and tenant-landlord relations as well as the police and judicial systems in colonial India. The Regulation XII of 1793 legislated that 'wandering' communities could be put to work on roads or otherwise forcibly settled down. British officials were encouraged to compile lists of these attributes pertaining to each community and, classify them on the basis of their usefulness to the state. Observable differences became inherent tendencies. When combined with poorly understood Indian notions of community, such tendencies became essential, unchanging certainties.
The Thuggee Act of 1836 set the legal precedent for the Criminal Tribes Act 1871. Colonial records characterises thuggee with five qualities—strangulation, secrecy, organisation, antiquity, and religiosity. These distinguished them from other categories of criminality and provided the basis of the 1836 act. Nevertheless, these understandings and common parlance precede British arrival in India. The Thuggee Act provided the legal jurisprudence to understanding crime in India as organised and hereditary in the person of a thug. The law allowed individuals to be convicted based solely on affiliation to a criminal group without evidence of having committed a crime.
The first mention of thuggee in the British archives is during murder investigations in 1809. In the Indian region of Etawah, the magistrate report of James Law to the Commander-in-Chief William Dowdeswell describing the involved thugs as strongly leagued together, organised, ancient, and secretive. In the same year, another report by Judge T. Brooke to Dowdeswell further defined thuggee as 'a crime in which unsuspecting travellers were approached in disguise, strangled with a scarf or catgut string, looted, and hidden.' The same definition was emphasised in Richard Sherwood's report in 1819 as well as that these groups were highly diverse, involving multiple castes, religions, and ethnicities. In 1830, William Henry Sleeman anonymously published an article which sealed the understanding that it was a religious practice. Sleeman, thereafter, wrote three books on thuggee.
Simultaneously, the late nineteenth century was an important turning point for British legal discourse with far reaching political and ideological consequences. Public interest in criminality was growing; crime and criminals increasingly became part of popular fact and fiction. Several reasons were cited for criminality, including alcohol, poverty, urbanisation, overcrowding, and decline in morality. Darwin's theories of evolution also provided for new social and political discussions. One school of thought attributed crime to genetic traits transmitted over generations. It provided for a deflection from serious enquiries to the causes of crime.
Sociologist Meena Radhakrishna argues that moral and material progress was demanded to be at a faster pace through a set of new social and political policies in the colonies. She also notes that after the revolt of 1857, many tribal chiefs were labelled traitors and considered rebellious. One of the important persons who participated in the revolt was Banke Chamar.
The colonial government found the demarcation between wandering criminal tribes, vagrants, itinerants, travelling tradesmen, nomads, gypsies, and eunuchs (hijras) difficult to manage. They were all grouped together, and their subsequent generations were labelled a law and order problem for the state. Though various marginalised caste groups were added to the list, the colonial government used the category of 'tribe' for rhetorical and administrative purposes. This categorisation evoked qualities of 'wildness' and 'savagery' in the way that caste seemed to fail.