At the time of Indian independence in 1947, thirteen million people in 127 communities faced search and arrest if any member of the group was found outside the prescribed area.

Therefore, Cherian argues that it was 'a complex of factors--landlessness, poverty, and the resultant martial weakness--in addition to a hereditary association with theft that led to a caste's perception as criminal.

Professor Henry Schwarz notes that, as early as 1772, under the governorship of Warren Hastings, legal regulations allowed for punishment of an offender's family and village.

[8] The growth of gang robbery by lowland villagers in the late eighteenth century was significantly due to the Cornwallis administrative reforms rather than changes in the economic production patters.

In the Indian region of Etawah, the magistrate report of James Law to the Commander-in-Chief William Dowdeswell describing the involved thugs as strongly leagued together, organised, ancient, and secretive.

In the same year, another report by Judge T. Brooke to Dowdeswell further defined thuggee as 'a crime in which unsuspecting travelers were approached in disguise, strangled with a scarf or catgut string, looted, and hidden.'

[13] Simultaneously, the late nineteenth century was an important turning point for British legal discourse with far reaching political and ideological consequences.

[17] Sociologist Meena Radhakrishna argues that moral and material progress was demanded to be at a faster pace through a set of new social and political policies in the colonies.

The colonial government found the demarcation between wandering criminal tribes, vagrants, itinerants, travelling tradesmen, nomads, gypsies, and eunuchs (hijras) difficult to manage.

[22] Under these acts, ethnic or social communities in India were defined as "addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences" such as thefts, and were registered by the government.

[25] In certain regions, entire caste groups were presumed guilty by birth, arrested, children separated from their parents, and held in penal colonies or quarantined without conviction or due process.

[31] When a man tells you that he is an offender against law, he has been so from the beginning, and will be so to the end, reform is impossible, for it is his trade, his caste, I may almost say his religion to commit crime.

[35] The Criminal Tribes Act was one of the many laws passed by the British colonial government that applied to Indians based on their religion and caste identification.

1897 saw another amendment to the Act, wherein local governments were empowered to establish separate "reformatory" settlements, for tribal boys from age four to eighteen years, away from their parents.

Looking at the historical context of lawmaking in British India, it seems that creating laws was not only aimed at addressing social issues and served as a means for the imperial government to shape its image.

Laws like the CTA were enacted to acknowledge and combat a widespread "social evil," and the act conveyed this message to the general public (Safdar 20).

When the colonial state annexed Punjab, it posed numerous challenges due to its geographical location and proximity to Afghanistan and the restive northern regions of India.

The crime statistics of the 1860s were inconsistent, with occasional fluctuations that colonial administrators attributed to different reasons, such as crop failure and the nomadic lifestyle of certain tribes.

During the 1860s, colonial lawmaking in Punjab was primarily aimed at addressing the issue of criminal activities by certain tribes, which presented a significant challenge for the provincial administration.

The colonial officials recognised the importance of maintaining law and order in the province and introduced various legal statutes, such as the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), to achieve this goal.

From then on, their movements were monitored through a system of compulsory registration and passes, which specified where the holders could travel and reside, and district magistrates were required to maintain records of all such people.

[46] The measure was a part of a wider attempt at social engineering which saw, for example, the categorisation of castes as being "agricultural" or "martial" as a means of facilitating the distribution of property or recognising which groups were loyal to the colonial government and therefore suitable for military recruitment, respectively.

The extent of these human rights violations is evident in the community survey, reflecting the urgent need for action to address this systemic issue (Borker 9).

For example, a woman of the Nandiwale tribe, who makes a living selling utensils and cutlery, was subjected to a violent attack in the Indapur block of Pune district.

[citation needed] The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 created the category of "eunuch" to refer to the many, often unrelated gender non-conforming communities in India, including hijras, khwajasarais, and kotis.

[58] The Criminal Tribes Act banned all behaviour considered "suspicious," warning that anyone found engaging in traditional hijra activities like public dancing or dressing in women's clothing would be arrested and/or forced to pay a fine.

Henry Schwarz, a professor at Georgetown University specialising in the history of colonial and postcolonial India, wrote that this decades-long practice was reversed at the start of the 20th century with the proclamation that people "could not be incarcerated indefinitely on the presumption of [inherited] bad character".

[62] The committee appointed in the same year by the central government to study the utility of the existence of this law, reported in 1950 that the system violated the spirit of the Indian constitution.

T. J. Gnanavel's 2021 Tamil film Jai Bhim discussed the injustices stemming from the legislative and social prejudices meted to these tribes in present India.

[70] Devi's work was influential in the 2005 short documentary movie Acting Like a Thief by P. Kerim Friedman and Shashwati Talukdar on a Chhara tribal theatre group in Ahmedabad, India.