Shadows Over Jungles: Dacoits and Environment in Nineteenth Century Colonial Bengal

In the nineteenth century, there were frequent incidents of gang robberies (dacoities) in Bengal. The Dacoits or gang robbers used to attack villages and towns and varied in number from one place to another and one region to another region. Their primary hideouts were mainly in jungles, along rivers or near highways. This article seeks to address several key questions. How were dacoity activities connected to these landscapes – jungles, rivers and highways? Could the ecology of these areas have served as a precondition for the intensity of dacoity? How did environmental influences impact the regional variation of dacoity’s intensity? Did changes in the environment in any way make a difference in the pattern of the number of dacoity activities? The article thus explores the complex interplay between ecology and crime in colonial Bengal. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .