From criminal savage to habitual offender

"The razor blade was our Laxmi," writes Lakshman Gaikwad in his celebrated 1987 autobiography Uchalya: The branded. "We would pray to the God of instrument (Ayudha) before every outing. We would cut chicken with the same blade and spray its blood on the participants and prayed – 'God, we pray for success in today's stealing mission. Rescue us from Police if we get caught…'" In the work, Gaikwad, a member of the Uchalya tribe, outlines the plight of Adivasi communities in India that had once been dubbed 'criminal' by the state. During the colonial era, members of certain tribes in India were branded as 'inherently criminal' by the British administration, inevitably leading to their cultural and socio-economic marginalisation.

W W Hunter, a senior British official, surveying England's work in India in 1881, noted that "thugi, dakaiti and predatory castes" must be suppressed in order to achieve "a more secure, more prosperous India". It was this general attitude that, a decade earlier, had led to the enactment of legislation to deal with such 'predatory' castes: the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), which aimed at the "registration, surveillance and control of certain criminal tribes and eunuchs". A 'criminal tribe' was thus legally described as a "tribe, gang, or class of persons … addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences."