Accidental Blogger

Of all the instances of human rights abuse through history, the Hindu caste system of India is surely the oldest, most entrenched order of societal and political inequity. Among India’s one billion plus people, hundreds of millions qualify as members of lower castes with myriad gradations and distinctions in their status, the levels of indignity heaped on them being inversely proportional to their position on the social ladder. At the lowest end of the complicated hierarchical scheme are those classified as untouchables (involved in “unclean” work) and some fall under the category of “criminals,” although not officially, but in the public perception. While the plight of the untouchables is fairly well known in most of the world, the “criminal” caste may come as a surprise to even some Indians. The indignity and danger associated with this peculiar social taxonomy is based not on legal grounds but merely the accident of birth and the ignorant bias of a long ago foreign occupier – the imperial British rule in India. 

The majority of the castes that were “notified” as criminals under the British belonged to India’s numerous nomadic tribes. Existing mostly on the periphery of society, nomads were rarely thought of as hereditary criminals through India’s history until quite recently. Although a few isolated groups in certain parts of India made their livelihoods through robbery and murder (often ritualized through religious customs), the vast majority co-existed peacefully with mainstream society as itinerant craftsmen, artisans, entertainers, animal handlers and even healers with knowledge of rare herbs and cures. The criminalization of the nomadic tribes took place when people with no fixed address or land to their name became the object of suspicion in the eyes of the highly bureaucratic British Raj who took it upon itself to systematically define India and Indians according to alien European-Christian sensibilities. The foreign rulers thus further complicated the existing local prejudices with their own distrust of dark skinned Gypsies of Europe. A double whammy for an already marginalized section of the population.

In the wake of India’s independence and the newly awakened consciousness about the pernicious and cruel nature of the caste system, progressive leaders like India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, tried to facilitate a settled identity for nomadic tribes. Among the steps taken was  the “de-notification” of the criminal status conferred on them by the British administration. Legislations were enacted to lift up all lower classes of Indians out of the centuries old state of disenfranchisement. As was (and still is) the case with most Indian bureaucratic measures, many of the programs failed to reach the target population due to inefficiency, indifference and often, outright hostility toward the lower castes both from public officials as well as fellow citizens. Over the past decades, incremental improvements in the plight of some groups have occurred as they have found vocal advocates within and outside their communities. But the poorest and the most cruelly exploited victims of India’s ingrained caste-ism have a long way to go in benefiting from the country’s economic, educational and employment opportunities. Attempts to assist or assimilate nomads sometimes poses the additional hurdle of tracking them down at a permanent address. Those who have chosen to settle down into a “sedentary” lifestyle, often find themselves in squalid slums without access to public amenities. Also, despite “de-notification” by the government of India,  the unfair label of “criminal” sticks to them and continues to foment suspicion of the tribes to their great detriment.

The February, 2010 issue of the National Geographic has an article that sheds light on the plight of  nomadic Indian tribes in this day and age of India’s great strides in the global economy. Reporter John Lancaster spent some days among the Lohars (blacksmiths) of central India and discovered that while their ancient identity is being fast stripped away by the galloping wave of modernization, the tribes are caught in a backward no-man’s land of poverty, suspicion and rejection – still outsiders looking in, denied both the incentive or the opportunity to assimilate with the rest of the country.  

(the 8 page article is worth checking out, as is the fabulous photo gallery)

These wanderers were once part of India’s mainstream. They meshed comfortably with the villagers who lived along their annual migration routes. In the 19th century, though, attitudes began to change. British administrators disparaged them as vagrants and criminals, sowing prejudice that survived colonial rule. The rapidly modernizing India of call centers and brand-obsessed youth has scant use for tinkers or bear trainers, and pastoralists are in a losing battle with industry and urban sprawl. Fragmented by caste, language, and region, the nomads are ignored by politicians and, in contrast to other downtrodden groups, have reaped few benefits from social welfare schemes.

Just defining the term “nomad” is problematic in India. Many groups that once unambiguously fit the category have clustered in slums in a process anthropologists call sedentarization. Yet India remains a rigidly stratified society in which birth is often synonymous with destiny. So, mobile or not, India’s nomads are united by a history of poverty and exclusion that continues to this day: arguably the biggest human rights crisis you’ve never heard of…

I asked Lallu where he was from, expecting him to name his birthplace, or perhaps the town where the family camped for the summer, when the weather is too hot for traveling. Instead he named a place he had never even seen.

“Chittaurgarh,” he said. And then he raised his fist above his head in a kind of salute.

Chittaurgarh is a massive sandstone fort on a plateau in southern Rajasthan. Built in the seventh century, it was the capital of Mewar, a powerful kingdom of the high-caste Hindu warriors known as Rajputs. The Lohar are Rajputs too, according to their oral tradition. They served the kingdom as weapon-makers. But in 1568, Chittaurgarh was captured by Akbar, the great Mogul emperor, and the Lohar fled.

Shamed, they committed to a life of wandering and self-denial, vowing never to spend the night in a village, light a lamp after dark, or even use rope to draw water from a well—pledges known collectively as the Oath. (They also vowed to do without comfortable beds and even now travel with their cots turned upside down, in symbolic observance of the ancient promise.)

Still, they had to earn a living, so they put their metalworking skills to more prosaic use. Their kitchenware and farm tools were prized for their durability and, in the age before manufacturing and low-cost Chinese imports, found no shortage of buyers.

India once teemed with such traveling niche workers. Many were first described in detail by a British civil servant, Denzil Ibbetson, in an 1883 report based on census data from the Punjab region. Among them were the Qalandari (“their ostensible occupation is that of leading about bears, monkeys and other performing animals”); the Nats (“acrobatic feats and conjuring of a low class”); the Gagra (“catching, keeping and applying leeches”); and the Kanjar (“curing boils”). “They are not pleasant people to deal with,” Ibbetson concluded, “and we are thrown but little into contact with them.”

Ibbetson’s observations reflected the prejudices of the day and the widely held belief in Britain that nomads—and especially the dark-skinned Romany-speaking people known as Gypsies—were incorrigible agents of vice. Such attitudes transferred easily to the subcontinent. In 1871, colonial authorities passed a notorious piece of legislation called the Criminal Tribes Act, which identified dozens of nomadic groups as, in effect, criminal by nature. Itinerant families were required to register with police, and thousands of men, women, and children were forcibly corralled in work camps, some of them run by the Salvation Army, according to the book Dishonoured by History,by Indian sociologist Meena Radhakrishna.

After independence in 1947, the law was replaced by a comparable if less draconian measure, the Habitual Offenders Act, and the stigma of criminality lingers. “I would never have imagined that the descendants of these communities would be viewed with exactly the same prejudices,” Radhakrishna says. “It’s not that they don’t want to be a part of society—they are not allowed to be.”