"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."
While drafting the CTA, some officials were indeed concerned about branding all members of a particular Adivasi community as criminal. Yet at the same time, there seemed to be general consensus that crime in these communities was 'hereditary' or 'habitual', in line with prevailing criminological and scientific thinking. In fact, the idea of a hereditary criminal class also served to deflect attention from enquiries into the real causes of crime, such as poverty, unemployment, economic depression, etc. In colonial India, such hereditary criminality was attributed to indigenous and nomadic communities. In addition, members of nomadic communities were seen to be backward, lazy and to possess criminal tendencies. Henry Mayhew, the 19th-century English journalist, coined the term "vagabond savage" to refer to nomadic communities, while the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle described them as "still in higher degree the ape". Itinerant communities were seen to be 'restless', and thus suspicious, whereas the sedentary communities who followed Western notions of settlement were seen as respectable. The solution, therefore, was to settle those who were wandering.
The presumption that the Roma community – European 'gypsies', whom the British administration already recognised as 'birth criminals' – originated in India played a significant role in the creation of the category of the nomadic criminal in British India. The latter were seen as the "Oriental representatives of the tent-loving gypsies of Europe". While on the one hand banjaras (nomads) were romanticised for their attractive looks, bright costumes and jewellery, and for the public perception of their exciting outdoor lives, on the other hand they were declared "ferocious criminals" by lawmakers.