Conjugality, Colonialism and the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in North India

The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 was a project to geographically redistribute and immobilize criminalized populations on the basis of family units. Family ties were a key site of contestation between criminalized people and the colonial state, as well as cooperation, or at least, situationally coinciding interests. This article’s focus on the family goes against the grain of existing literature, which has primarily debated the historical causes of the CTA and the colonial construction of the ‘criminal tribe’. This article explores a particular type of family tie—marriage—to provide a new vantage point on the minutiae of everyday life under the CTA, while also shedding light on the history of conjugality in modern South Asia. In 1891, the colonial government in north India launched a matchmaking campaign in which district Magistrates became marriage brokers. Colonial governments showed an uneven concern with marriage practices, which varied between criminalized communities and over time. In the case of ‘nomadic’ criminalized groups, colonial governments were more concerned with conjugality, since they attempted more significant transformations in the relationships between individuals, families, social groupings and space. Moreover, criminalized peoples’ strategies and demands propelled colonial involvement into marital matters. Yet the colonial government could not sustain a highly interventionist management of intimate relationships.