Landscapes of crime : land, architecture, and the Criminal Tribes Act in Punjab, 1856-1885

This thesis investigates the relationship between land, architecture, and criminal law in colonial Punjab between 1856 and 1885. It focuses on the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), passed in 1871, using both British officials’ correspondence and official state publications to understand colonial officials’ attitudes towards land, crime, and caste. Officials understood ‘hereditary’ crime to be both a symptom of and the cause of ‘improper’ relationships with land and architecture. Officials therefore sought to control land and architecture in order to eliminate ‘hereditary’ crime. They confined communities to their villages, established reformatory settlements aimed at extracting agricultural labor, and destroyed the houses of those who defied state control. In analyzing these initiatives, though, it becomes clear that British officials did not possess a unified understanding of the purpose of the CTA. Some manipulated land and architecture to control criminalized communities, some to ‘reform’ criminalized communities, and some to punish criminalized communities. These interests competed, creating contradictions in the operation of the law. Officials’ attempts to control landscape were further shaped by disputes over finances and local authority. These findings have wider implications for scholarship on the CTA, on land policy in colonial Punjab, and on colonial power more broadly. First, it demonstrates that in designing and administering land policy, the colonial Punjab state was less conservative than has been established, as officials sought to use the CTA to remake caste and social hierarchy. Second, it demonstrates that the CTA was not a unified, centralized project with one animating impulse and desired outcome, as historians have implied. Rather, in its implementation it was uneven and contingent, demonstrating that officials did not share a common aim or common understandings. This, more broadly, implies that significant gaps exist between what British officials sought to do, and what was actually carried out in colonial India, implying that historians must look both to law and to the operations of law in understanding colonial legal power. Overall, the CTA must be thought of as a state attempt to control both crime and land that was deeply fractured, but still had disastrous impacts on criminalized communities.