The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen In British India *
TL;DR: The Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades and revealed that behind the façade-anxieties over 'criminal castes' and 'crises of crime' stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Abstract This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.
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TL;DR: This paper showed that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent, drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes, including Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts.
Abstract: This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.
60 citations
Cites background from "The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Ove..."
...The archives of his Thuggee and Dacoity Department were later repeatedly cited as prima facie evidence for the existence of criminal tribes (Piliavsky 2013b)....
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...…agents, and hunting assistants (e.g., Hunter 1843), and late in that century incorporated many into the newly formed colonial police (Arnold 1986; Piliavsky 2013b).39 British officers often replicated indigenous styles of patronage, sealing their employees’ loyalties with customary gifts of…...
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...Piliavsky 2013b).45 When they were finally approved, the criminal tribe initiatives (like the Thuggee campaign before them) were perennially under-funded....
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...Drastically understaffed reformatory colonies often dispersed within weeks of being formed, and the whole venture was perennially vulnerable to fiscal and administrative collapse (Singha 1993; Brown 2002: 84; Piliavsky 2013b)....
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...They suspected I was a government agent and hoped I would hire them as informers and bodyguards, just as local landlords, policemen, and petty politicians do (Piliavsky 2013a)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border, is described, focusing on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladesh mainland.
Abstract: This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram's post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I examine Dahagram's past(s) as narratives of postcolonial belonging: to fragmented conceptions of state and nation, to surrounding areas, and to the enclave itself. I focus on the overlapping tensions between national and local struggles to ‘claim’ Dahagram as Bangladeshi or Indian territory, and uneven processes of political inclusion within and around the enclaves and within the Bangladeshi State. I use ‘belonging’ as a double-entendre, as these tensions are all intimately linked to possession of land/territory, goods, and access to markets. The notion of belonging(s) helps to illuminate Dahagram's historical and contemporary cultural politics and political-economy, as well as its articulations with broader events in postcolonial South Asia. Yet, belonging is also an analytic for understanding how history is remembered and articulated as a claim to territory, rights, and membership in unstable places.
37 citations
Book•
04 Apr 2019TL;DR: Hinchy as mentioned in this paper argues that Hijras were criminalised not simply because of imported British norms, but due to a complex set of local factors, including elite Indian attitudes.
Abstract: In 1865, the British rulers of north India resolved to bring about the gradual 'extinction' of transgender Hijras. This book, the first in-depth history of the Hijra community, illuminates the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality and the production of colonial knowledge. From the 1850s, colonial officials and middle class Indians increasingly expressed moral outrage at Hijras' feminine gender expression, sexuality, bodies and public performances. To the British, Hijras were an ungovernable population that posed a danger to colonial rule. In 1871, the colonial government passed a law that criminalised Hijras, with the explicit aim of causing Hijras' 'extermination'. But Hijras evaded police, kept on the move, broke the law and kept their cultural traditions alive. Based on extensive archival work in India and the UK, Jessica Hinchy argues that Hijras were criminalised not simply because of imported British norms, but due to a complex set of local factors, including elite Indian attitudes.
29 citations
02 Dec 2013
21 citations
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01 Jan 197519 citations
References
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29 Apr 1983
TL;DR: This article explored examples of this process of invention -the creation of Welsh Scottish national culture, the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the origins of imperial ritual in British India and Africa, and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own.
Abstract: Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparative recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial ritual in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. This book addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historicans and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which possess new questions for the understanding of our history.
7,291 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1985
TL;DR: The state and economic transformation: toward an analysis of the conditions underlying effective intervention Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Peter B. Evans as mentioned in this paper Theda Skocpol Part I. The state and Taiwan's economic development Alice H. Amsden Part II.
Abstract: Preface Introduction 1. Bringing the state back in: strategies of analysis in current research Theda Skocpol Part I. States as Promoters of Economic Development and Social Redistribution: 2. The state and economic transformation: toward an analysis of the conditions underlying effective intervention Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Peter B. Evans 3. The state and Taiwan's economic development Alice H. Amsden 4. State structures and the possibilities for 'Keynesian' responses to the great depression in Sweden, Britain and the United States Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol Part II. States and Transnational Relations: 5. War making and state making as organized crime Charles Tilly 6. Transnational linkages and the economic role of the state: an analysis of developing and industrialized nations in the post-World War II period Peter B. Evans 7. Small nations in an open international economy: the converging balance of state and society in Switzerland and Austria Peter Katzenstein Part III. States and the Patterning of Social Conflicts: 8. Working-class formation and the state: nineteenth-century England in American perspective Ira Katznelson 9. Hegemony and religious conflict: british imperial control and political cleavages in Yorubaland David D. Laitin 10. State power and the strength of civil society in the southern cone of Latin America Alfred Stepan Conclusion 11. On the road toward a more adequate understanding of the state Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol Index.
2,923 citations
08 May 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that war makes states, and discuss that mercantile capitalism and state-making reinforced each other in European experience and offer tentative arguments concerning principles of change and variation underlying experience War making, extraction and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making.
Abstract: This chapter claims war makes states, and discusses that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced each other The reflections that follow merely illustrate analogy of war making and state making with organized crime from few hundred years of European experience and offer tentative arguments concerning principles of change and variation underlying experience War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence Government's provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services, and expertise
1,938 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1985
TL;DR: In this article, the traditional state: Bureaucracy, Class, Ideology, Administrative Power, Internal Pacification, Citizenship, and Class, Sovereignty and Citizenship are discussed.
Abstract: Introduction. 1. State, Society and Modern History. 2. The Traditional State: Domination and Military Power. 3. The Traditional State: Bureaucracy, Class, Ideology. 4. The Absolutist State and the Nation--State. 5. Capitalism, Industrialism and Social Transformation. 6. Capitalism and the State: From Absolutism to the Nation--State. 7. Administrative Power, Internal Pacification. 8. Class, Sovereignty and Citizenship. 9. Capitalist Development and the Industrialization of War. 10. Nation--States in the Global State System. 11. Modernity, Totalitarianism and Critical Theory. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
1,351 citations