This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Sinha, N. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Mobility, control and criminality in early colonial India, 1760s–1850s

Nitin Sinha is at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany

The article looks into the ways certain mobile groups like the banjaras, gosains, fakirs and sanyasis were ‘criminalised’ by the colonial state between the periods of the 1760s and 1850s. Historiographically, the article argues for looking at the early colonial period more closely than has hitherto been done to understand the changing material and circulatory regimes in which these peripatetic groups operated. Unlike the current historiographical convention, which would explain crime as the artefact of a paranoid colonial mind-set, this article traces criminality to the disruption in prevailing patterns of trade and transport, and the livelihoods supported by them, consequent to colonial settlement and, in this region (eastern India), the rise of the kingdom of Nepal.

Indian Economic & Social History Review, Vol. 45, No. 1, 1-33 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/001946460704500101


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?