• DOI:10.1177/001946469002700302
• Corpus ID: 145441031

Disciplining and policing the 'criminals by birth', Part 2: The development of a disciplinary system, 1871-1900

@article{Nigam1990DiscipliningAP,
  title={Disciplining and policing the 'criminals by birth', Part 2: The development of a disciplinary system, 1871-1900},
  author={Sanjay K. Nigam},
  journal={Indian Economic \& Social History Review},
  year={1990},
  volume={27},
  pages={257 - 287}
}

• S. Nigam
• Published 1 September 1990
• History, Law
• Indian Economic & Social History Review

The discourse on criminal tribes was affirmed in the Act of 1871, which both cast a specific ’type’ and sought to mould it further by an entire apparatus of surveillance and control. That the knowledge of groups officially designated as criminal by birth, creed and caste, developed an entire apparatus of coercive and disciplinary measures~registration, roll-call, limitation on movement, the pass system, agricultural settlements, reformatory camps, workhouses, the separation of children from their parents-is a clear indication of the operation of power/knowledge, the operation of discursive practices. In other words, in the practices of segregation, exclusion and resettlement envisaged in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, the power of colonial discourse is first confirmed by the creation of a criminal-type with which these practices were intended to deal. Of course the Criminal Tribes Act was not the earliest of the coercive