Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-hvd4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-03T18:58:11.979Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The “Criminal Tribe” in India before the British

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2015

Anastasia Piliavsky
Anastasia Piliavsky*
Affiliation:
Girton College, Cambridge
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 323 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, Clare. 2004. Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Andersson, Axel. 2013. Obscuring Capitalism: Vivek Chibber's Critique of Subaltern Studies. Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 Nov.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1993. Number in the Colonial Imagination, In Breckenridge, C. A. and van der Veer, P., eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 314–39.Google Scholar
Arnold, David. 1986. Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, Crispin. 2006. Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bayly, Chris A. 1985. Pre-History of ‘Communialism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860. Modern Asian Studies 19, 2: 177–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayly, Chris A. 1999. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, N. and Mohanty, B. B.. 2007. Imperial Solution of a Colonial Problem: Bhils of Khandesh up to c. 1850. Modern Asian Studies 41: 343–67.Google Scholar
Bernier, François. 1891. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668. Westminster: Constable.Google Scholar
Beveridge, Annette S. 1921. The Bābur-Nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur). London: Luzac.Google Scholar
Blackburn, Stuart H. 1978. The Kallars: A Tamil ‘Criminal Tribe’ Reconsidered. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 1, 1: 38–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloomfield, Maurice. 1899. The Atharvaveda. Strassburg: Trübner.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Maurice. 1913. The Character and Adventures of Muladeva. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 25, 212: 616–50.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Maurice. 1919. The Life and Stories of the Jaina Savior Pārśvanātha. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Maurice. 1923a. The Art of Stealing in Hindu Fiction, Part I. American Journal of Philology 44, 2: 97–133.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Maurice. 1923b. The Art of Stealing in Hindu Fiction, Part II. American Journal of Philology 44, 3: 193–229.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Maurice. 1926. On Organized Brigandage in Hindu Fiction. American Journal of Philology 47, 3: 205–33.Google Scholar
Böhtlingk, Otto von. 1870–1873. Indische Sprüche: Sanskrit und Deutsch. 3 vols. St. Petersburg: Commissionäre der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften.Google Scholar
Bolling, George M. and Negelein, Julius von. 1909. The Pariśiṣtas of the Atharvaveda. Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Breckenridge, Carol and Veer, Peter van der, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Broughton, Thomas D. 1892. Letters Written in a Mahratta Camp during the Year 1809: Descriptive of the Character, Manners, Domestic Habits, and Religious Ceremonies, of the Mahrattas. Westminster [London]: A. Constable.Google Scholar
Brown, Mark. 2002. Crime, Governance and the Company Raj: The Discovery of Thuggee. British Journal of Criminology 42, 1: 77–95.Google Scholar
Brown, Mark. 2004. Crime, Liberalism and Empire: Governing the Mina Tribe of Northern India. Social Legal Studies 13, 2: 191–218.Google Scholar
Bruce, George. 1968. The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and Its Overthrow in British India. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
Bühler, Georg. 1886. The Laws of Manu: Translated, with Extracts from Seven Commentaries. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Chakravarti, Anand. 1975. Contradiction and Change: Emerging Patterns of Authority in a Rajasthan Village. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chakravarty, Gautam. 2005. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L., eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 271–316.Google Scholar
Chalmers, Robert and Cowell, Edward B.. 1895. Jātaka Stories, or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chardin, Jean. 1811. Voyages De Monsieur Le Chevalier Chardin En Perse Et Autres Lieux De L'orient (The travels of Sir John Chardin in Persia and the Orient). Paris: Langlés.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Amal. 1998. Representations of India, 1740–1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.Google Scholar
Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. 1988. On Orientalism. In The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 20–38.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. 1985. The Command of Language and the Language of Command. In Guha, Ranajit, ed., Subaltern Studies IV. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. The Census, Social Structure and Objectification of South Asia. In Cohn, Bernard, ed., An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 224–54.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Daniélou, Alain. 1991. The Myths and Gods of India: The Classic Work on Hindu Polytheism from the Princeton Bollingen Series. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International.Google Scholar
Das, Sukla. 1977. Crime and Punishment in Ancient India, c. A.D. 300 to A.D. 110. Delhi: Abhinav Publications.Google Scholar
Desai, Gaurav. 1993. The Invention of Invention. Cultural Critique 24 (Spring): 119–42.Google Scholar
Dieter, George. 1991. Ṣaṇmukhakalpa: Ein Lehrbuch Der Zauberei Und Diebeskunst Aus Dem Indischen Mittelalter. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.Google Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B. 1987. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B. 1992a. Castes of Mind: The Institution of Caste in India. Representations 37: 56–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B., ed. 1992b. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: Comparative Studies in Society and History Book Series, University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B. 1996. “Foreword.” In Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, ix–xvii.Google Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Doniger, Wendy. 1976. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Doniger, Wendy and Smith, Brian K.. 1991. The Laws of Manu. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1957. Une Sous-Caste De L'inde Du Sud: Organisation Sociale Et Religion Des Pramalai Kallar. PhD thesis, Mouton, l'Université de Paris, 1954.Google Scholar
Dundas, Paul. 1995. Some Jain References to the Thags and the Samsaramocaka. Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, 2: 281–84.Google Scholar
Eaton, Richard M. 2000. (Re)imag(in)ing Otherness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India. Journal of World History 11, 1: 57–78.Google Scholar
Elliott, Henry Miers. 1867–1877. The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. London: Trübner & Co.Google Scholar
Falk, Harry. 1986. Bruderschaft und Würfelspiel: Untersuchungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des vedischen Opfers. Freiburg: H. Falk.Google Scholar
Fick, Richard. 1897. Die Sociale Gliederung im Nordöstlichen Indien zu Buddhas Zeit, mit Besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kastenfrage, Vornehmlich auf Grund der Jâtaka Dargestellt. Kiel: C. F. Haeseler.Google Scholar
Forbes, Alexander K. et al. 1856. Rās Mālā; or Hindoo Annals of the Province of Goozerat, in Western India. 2 vols. London: Richardson Brothers.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Gordon, Colin, ed. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Fourcade, Marie. 2003. The So-Called “Criminal Tribes” of British India: Colonial Violence and Traditional Violence. In Vidal, D., Tarabout, G., and Meyer, E., eds., Violences/Non-Violence: Some Hindu Perspectives. New Delhi: Manohar, 143–73.Google Scholar
Fox, Richard G. 1971. Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Preindustrial India. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Franklin, Michael J. 2006. Romantic Representations of British India. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Freitag, Sandria B. 1985. Collective Crime and Authority in North India. In Yang, A. A., ed., Crime and Criminality in British India. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 140–61.Google Scholar
Freitag, Sandria B. 1991. Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North-India. Modern Asian Studies 25, 2: 227–61.Google Scholar
Freitag, Sandria B. 1998. Sansiahs and the State: The Changing Nature of “Crime” and “Justice” in Nineteenth-Century British India. In Anderson, M. and Guha, S., eds., Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 82–113.Google Scholar
Ganguli, K. M. 1883–1896. The Mahābhārata. Calcutta: P. C. Roy.Google Scholar
Gelders, Raf. 2009. Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Tradition and the Limits of European Representation. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 3: 563–89.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles J. 1893. The Skandayāga, Text and Translation. Journal of the American Oriental Society 15: v–xiii.Google Scholar
Gordon, Stewart. 1969. Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century Malwa. Indian Economic and Social History Review 6, 4: 416–29.Google Scholar
Gordon, Stewart. 1985. Bhils and the Idea of a Criminal Tribe in Nineteenth-Century India. In Yang, A. A., ed., Crime and Criminality in British India. Tucson: Arizona University Press, 128–39.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit. 1999. Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit. 2003. Book Review: Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Indian Economic and Social History Review 40, 4: 459–62.Google Scholar
Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1983. Studies in Kumārila and Śaṅkara. Reinbek: Wezler.Google Scholar
Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1991. Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Hertel, Johannes. 1920. Kathāratnākara (Das Märchenmeer): Eine Sammlung indischer Erzählungen. 2 vols. München: G. Müller.Google Scholar
Hervey, Charles. 1892. Some Records of Crime: Being the Diary of a Year, Official and Particular, of an Officer of the Thuggee and Dacoitie Police. London: S. Low, Marston.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. 1990. Icons and Identity: Religious Orthodoxy and Social Practice in Rural Crete. Anthropological Quarterly 63, 3: 109–21.Google Scholar
Hunter, William. 1843. Report on Some of the Rights, Privileges, and Usages of the Hill Populations in Meywar. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 8, 15: 176–92.Google Scholar
Hutchins, Francis G. 1967. The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Inden, Ronald B. 1986. Orientalist Constructions of India. Modern Asian Studies 20, 3: 401–46.Google Scholar
Inden, Ronald B. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Irschick, Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Helen M. 1920. Rāuhineya's Adventures, the Rāuhineyacarita. In Studies in Honor of Maurice Bloomfield. Edited by his students. New Haven: Yale University Press, 159–96.Google Scholar
Jones, M. E. Monckton. 1918. Warren Hastings in Bengal 1772–1774. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Kale, Moreshvar R., trans. and ed. 1966. Daśakumāracarita of Daṇḍin. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas.Google Scholar
Kasturi, Malavika. 2002. Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-Century North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kothari, Dev, ed. 1985. Ranachod Bhatt's Amarakāvyam. Udaipur.Google Scholar
Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Tom. 2008. Thuggee, Marginality and the State Effect in Colonial India, Circa 1770–1840. Indian Economic and Social History Review 45, 2: 201–37.Google Scholar
Lockman, John. 1762. Travels of the Jesuits, into Various Parts of the World: Particularly China and the East-Indies. [London]: printed for T. Piety.Google Scholar
Lombroso, Cesare. 1876. L'uomo Delinquente, in Rapporto All'antropologia, Alla Giurisprudenza Ed Alle Discipline Carcerarie. Torino: Bocca.Google Scholar
Lorenzen, David N. 2006. Who Invented Hinduism? Essays on Religion in History. New Delhi: Yoda Press.Google Scholar
Major, Andrew. 1999. State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the “Dangerous Classes.” Modern Asian Studies 33, 3: 657–88.Google Scholar
Malamoud, Charles. 1975. La Brique Percée (Sur Le Jeu De Vide at Du Plein Dans L'inde Brāhmanique). Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 11: 205–22.Google Scholar
Malcolm, John. 1832. A Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa, and Adjoining Provinces: With the History, and Copious Illustrations, of the Past and Present Condition of that Country. London: Kingsbury Parbury & Allen.Google Scholar
Manucci, Niccoláo and Irvine, William. 1907. Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, 1653–1708. 3 vols. Irvine, William, trans. and ed. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Masters, John. 1952. The Deceivers. London: M. Joseph.Google Scholar
Mayaram, Shail. 1991. Criminality or Community? Alternative Constructions of the Mev Narrative of Darya Khan. Contributions to Indian Sociology 25, 1: 57–84.Google Scholar
Mayaram, Shail. 2003a. Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Mayaram, Shail. 2003b. Kings versus Bandits: Anti-Colonialism in a Bandit Narrative. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13, 3: 315–38.Google Scholar
Metcalf, Thomas. 1994. The New Cambridge History of India, Volume III.A: Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Monier-Williams, Monier. 1876. A Sanskṛit-English Dictionary Etymologically and Philologically Arranged, with Special Reference to Greek, Latin, Gothic, German, Anglo-Saxon, and other Cognate Indo-European Languages. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Narayana Rao, Velcheru, Shulman, David, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, eds. 2001. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800. Delhi: Permanent Black.Google Scholar
Nigam, Sanjay. 1990a. Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth,” Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype—the Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India. Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, 2: 131–64.Google Scholar
Nigam, Sanjay. 1990b. Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth,” Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900. Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, 3: 257–87.Google Scholar
O'Hanlon, Rosalind and Washbrook, David. 1992. After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 1: 141–67.Google Scholar
Olivelle, Patrick. 2004. The Law Code of Manu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Olivelle, Patrick. 2013. King, Governance and Law in Ancient India: Kautilya's Arthaśāstra. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2d ed.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Padamsee, Alex. 2005. Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse. London: Palgrave Connect.Google Scholar
Pandian, Anand. 2009. Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Parker, Henry. 1910–1914. Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon. London: Luzac & Co.Google Scholar
Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Passi, Alessandro, trans. and ed. 2001. Dharmacauryarasástra (L'elisir Del Furto Secondo Il Dharma). Milano: Edizioni Ariele.Google Scholar
Passi, Alessandro. 2005. Perverted Dharma? Ethics of Thievery in the Dharmacauryarasayana. Journal of Indian Philosophy 33, 4: 513–28.Google Scholar
Peabody, Norbert. 2001. Cents, Sense, and Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 4: 819–50.Google Scholar
Peabody, Norbert. 2003. Hindu Kingship and Polity in Pre-Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Peabody, Norbert. 2013. On the Origins of Indian Nationalism. Lecture given to the Royal Asiatic Society, 13 June.Google Scholar
Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2011a. A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Rural India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 2: 290–313.Google Scholar
Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2011b. Theft, Patronage and Society in Western India. DPhil thesis, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2013a. Borders without Borderlands: On the Social Reproduction of State Demarcation in Western India. In Gellner, David N., ed., Borderlands of Northern South Asia: Non-State Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 20–48.Google Scholar
Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2013b. The Moghia Menace, or the Watch over Watchmen in British India. Modern Asian Studies 47, 3: 751–79.Google Scholar
Pinch, William R. 1999. Same Difference in India and Europe. History and Theory 38, 3: 389–407.Google Scholar
Prakash, Gyan. 1990. Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography. Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2: 383–408.Google Scholar
Radhakrishna, Meena. 1989. The Criminal Tribes Act in Madras Presidency—Implications for Itinerant Trading Communities. Indian Economic and Social History Review 26, 3: 269–95.Google Scholar
Radhakrishna, Meena. 1992. Surveillance and Settlements under the Criminal-Tribes Act in Madras. Indian Economic and Social History Review 29, 2: 171–98.Google Scholar
Radhakrishna, Meena. 2000. Colonial Construction of a ‘Criminal’ Tribe: Yerukulas of Madras Presidency. Economic and Political Weekly, July 5–18: 2553–63.Google Scholar
Radhakrishna, Meena. 2001. Dishonoured by History: “Criminal Tribes” and British Colonial Policy. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.Google Scholar
Raj, Kapil. 2006. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Delhi: Permanent Black.Google Scholar
Raj, Kapil. 2009. Mapping Knowledge: Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820. In Schaffer, Simon, Roberts, Lissa, Raj, Kapil, and Delbourgo, James, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820. Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 105–50.Google Scholar
Raj, Kapil. 2013. Beyond Postcolonialism … and Positivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science. Isis 104: 337–47.Google Scholar
Richards, John F. and Rao, V. N.. 1980. Banditry in Mughal India: Historical and Folk Perspectives. Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, 1: 95–120.Google Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. 2013. Subaltern-Speak. n + 1: 18–21.Google Scholar
Roque, Ricardo and Wagner, Kim A., eds. 2012. Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Russell, Robert V. and Lal, Rai Bahadur Hira. 1916. The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ryder, Arthur W. and Lanman, Charles R., trans. and eds. 1905. The Little Clay Cart (Mṛcchakaṭika), a Hindu Drama Attributed to King Shūdraka. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Saïd, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Samarendra, Padmanabh. 2011. Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste. Economic and Political Weekly 46, 33: 51–58.Google Scholar
Sangar, Satya P. 1967. Crime and Punishment in Mughal India. Delhi: Sterling Publishers.Google Scholar
San Juan, Epifanio. Jr. 1998. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Sapra, Rahul. 2011. The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India. Newark: University of Delaware Press.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Jadunath. 1935. Mughal Administration. 3d ed.Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Simon, Roberts, Lissa, Raj, Kapil, and Delbourgo, James, eds. 2009. The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820. Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications.Google Scholar
Scharfe, Hartmut. 2002. Education in Ancient India. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Henry. 2010. Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief. London: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Seth, Vanita. 2010. Europe's Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Shulman, David. 1980. On South Indian Bandits and Kings. Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, 3: 283–306.Google Scholar
Shulman, David. 1985. The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Singha, Radhika. 1993. “Providential” Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation. Modern Asian Studies 27, 1: 83–146.Google Scholar
Singha, Radhika. 1998. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Sinha, Nandini. 2000. Reconstructing Identity and Situating Themselves in History: A Preliminary Note on the Meenas of Jaipur City. Indian Historical Review 27, 1: 29–43.Google Scholar
Sinha, Surajit. 1962. State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India. Man in India 42, 1: 35–80.Google Scholar
Skaria, Ajay. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William H. 1836. Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Particular Language Used by the Thugs. Calcutta: G. H. Gutman, Military Orphan Press.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William H. 1839. The Thugs or Phansigars of India. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William H. 1849. Report on the Budhuk Alias Bagree Decoits and other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession and on the Measures Adopted by the Government of India, for Their Suppression. Calcutta: J. C. Sherriff, Bengal Military Orphan Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann L. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Streets-Salter, Heather. 2004. Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2008. Further Thoughts on an Enigma: The Tortuous Life of Nicólo Manucci, 1638–c. 1720. Indian Economic and Social History Review 45, 1: 35–76.Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Shulman, David. 1990. The Men Who Would Be King? The Politics of Expansion in Early 17th-Century Northern Tamil-Nadu. Modern Asian Studies 24, 2: 225–48.Google Scholar
Talbot, Cynthia. 1995. Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, 4: 692–722.Google Scholar
Talukdar, Shashwati and Friedman, P. Kerim, directors. 2011. Please Don't Beat Me, Sir! 73 minutes. Woodstock, N.Y.: Four Nine and a Half Pictures.Google Scholar
Tawney, Charles H. 1923. The Ocean of Story; being C. H. Tawney's Translation of Somadeva's kathā sarit sāgara; or, Ocean of Streams of Story. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.Google Scholar
Tawney, Charles H. and Leumann, Ernst, trans. and eds. 1895. The Kathākośa, or Treasury of Stories. London: Royal Asiatic Society.Google Scholar
Taylor, Philip Meadows. 1839. Confessions of a Thug. London: Richard Bentley.Google Scholar
Teltscher, Kate. 1995. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thapar, Romila. 1971. The Image of the Barbarian in Early India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, 4: 408–36.Google Scholar
Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tod, James. 1920 [1829–32]. Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India. Crooke, W., ed. 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tolen, Rachel J. 1991. Colonizing and Transforming the Criminal Tribesman—The Salvation Army in British-India. American Ethnologist 18, 1: 106–25.Google Scholar
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1999a. Hullabaloo about Telugu. South Asia Research 19, 1: 53–70.Google Scholar
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1999b. Inventing the History of South India. In Ali, Daud, ed., Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 36–54.Google Scholar
Trautmann, Thomas R. 2006. Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Tuker, Francis I. 1961. The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman, or Major-General Sir William Henry. London: Dent.Google Scholar
Unnithan-Kumar, Maya. 1997. Identity, Gender, and Poverty: New Perspectives on Caste and Tribe in Rajasthan. Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Verma, Arvind. 2002. Consolidation of the Raj: Notes from a Police Station in British India, 1865–1928. In Knafla, L. A., ed., Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Vidal, Denis. 1997. Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Viramma, Josiane Racine and Racine, Jean-Luc. 1997. Viramma: Life of an Untouchable. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Vishwanathan, Gauri. 1990. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Von Schiefner, Anton and Ralston, William R. S.. 1906. Tibetan Tales, Derived from Indian Sources. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner.Google Scholar
Wagner, Kim A. 2007. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Wagner, Kim A. 2009. Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, Kim A. 2010. Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in Early Nineteenth-Century India. History Workshop Journal 69: 27–51.Google Scholar
Wagoner, Phillip B. 2003. Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 4: 783–814.Google Scholar
Williams, R. G. 1993. Shadows of Imperialism, Canonical Typology in Taylor “Confessions of a Thug.” Dalhousie Review 72, 4: 482–93.Google Scholar
Woolner, Arthur Cooper and Sarup, Lakshman, trans. and eds. 1930–1931. Thirteen Trivandrum Plays. London: Published for the University of the Panjab, Lahore, by Oxford University.Google Scholar
Young, Robert. 2002. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zaidi, Sunita. 1989. The Mughal State and Tribes in Seventeenth-Century Sind. Indian Economic and Social History Review 26, 3: 343–62.Google Scholar
Zimmermann, Francis. 1987. The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar