Colonial legacies and branded identities: labour market exclusion among India’s Denotified Tribes

After the 1857 rebellion against colonial rule, the British Colonial government enacted Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 to control some sections of Indian society. The Act notified the nomadic, semi-nomadic, and tribes as hereditary criminals. This CT Act was later repealed in 1952, and denotified all the affected communities, known as ‘de-notified tribes’ since then. This article attempts to analyse the occupational pattern of the members of one such de-notified community of Tamil Nadu, the Kuravars, who were historically engaged in salt/grain trade in the Madras Presidency. The study was based on primary data collected from 399 sample households from Kuravar settlements in Madurai and Virudhunagar districts of Tamil Nadu state through a semi-structured interview schedule. The study found that, after their denotification in 1952, the members of Kuravar community are gradually confined to the most menial, precarious occupations in the informal economy, with no further scope for upward mobility. The paper argues that their past stigma and present-day caste status block their upward occupational mobility and confine them to menial occupations, such as sanitation-related work, petty trade, and self-employment work in the informal economy, with very low earnings.