Girton College

"Anastasia Piliavsky steps beyond the law to explore the secret world of Kanjars, a “caste of professional thieves” found in the cities and towns of Rajasthan. Kanjars are said to have magical powers, a private language, and knowledge of hidden treasures. Although Kanjar lore is shrouded in secrecy, Piliavsky shows that much of it is public knowledge. Kanjar marginality enhances their ability to work on both sides of the law. They are notorious thieves and valuable police informants. Masters of breaking and entering, they are commonly employed as watchmen. They cannot be trusted as a group, but they are used as go-betweens in private disputes between members of wealthy families. Piliavsky maps the transition Kanjars are now making between a politico-legal order in which they worked as (secret) agents of dominant families, to a new regime in which local policemen protect them in exchange for information and, it would seem, a cut of the profits Kanjars make from illegal alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and theft. It is often police who cover up evidence of Kanjar crimes, and it is often Kanjars who assist police in apprehending their fellows. The relations of ambivalent interdependence that result are easily mistaken for corruption, but Piliavsky suggests another interpretation. Kanjars allow their protectors to communicate in languages that cannot be officially spoken. These conversations are essential to the maintenance of public culture, a sphere in which the intimate affairs of elite families and the darker side of law enforcement can flourish as public secrets"

Patronage is a structural pivot of social life in South Asia. Drawing on the ethnography of relations between a caste of professional thieves in rural Rajasthan, known as Kanjars, and their patron-goddesses, I show that patronage is also, crucially, a normative formula which encompasses a set of values. I examine the nature of these values, and why the Kanjars value them such a lot, to show an alternative sense of hierarchy, based neither on substantive values (like purity or auspiciousness) nor on transactions, but on a set of relational values (like attachment and generosity) which may have cardinal provenance beyond the given context.

This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India’s itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 6 -India's demotic democracy and its 'depravities' in the ethnographi c longue durée pp. 154-175 goonda raj, gangster rule (Financial Times 2 May 2007, 11; ibid. 6 March 2012; also Michelutti, Chapter 12 in this volume). A recent pre-election study of candidates fielded by the major political parties in the province revealed that more than a third had criminal histories (Ians 2012).

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 Brahminical 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.

From the back cover:
‘By insisting that what we call “patronage” is above all a moral idiom, and by rejecting arguments that would prefer to confine patronage to the theoretical dustbin referred to as “tradition”, this brilliant volume will transform the study of South Asian politics. It combines a stellar assembly of researchers and imaginatively analysed case studies, and will provoke exciting debates about the past, present and future of democracy - both in South Asia itself, and far beyond.’
Jonathan Spencer, Professor of the Anthropology of South Asia
University of Edinburgh

‘It is remarkable how much the historical course in India is guided rather by institutional memories and their persisting structural paradigms. Testifying to this reproduction of the past in modern political garb, essay after essay of this fine work offers a nuanced, anthropological sense of how cultural order is revealed by historical change, even as the change manifests a historical order.’
Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
The University of Chicago

'Even those of us who see the importance of patronage waning will find an abundance of crucial insights in these subtle, deeply learned analyses.'
James Manor, Professor of Commonwealth Studies
University of London

‘This excellent book demonstrates the importance of maintaining a focus on morality as it intersects with political and economic process ... Drawing on rich empirical case material, it is a refreshing and revitalizing “return” to the category of patronage that will be valuable to both regional specialists and those with a broader interest in global political processes.’
Jon P Mitchell, Reader in Anthropology, Director of Doctoral Studies for Global Studies
University of Sussex

The public sphere has been centre stage in celebrations of India’s political triumphs. Leading commentators tell us that the astonishing post-independence surge of democracy has been contingent on the rise of a new kind of socio-political formation: the public sphere. This paper takes a closer look at the popular deliberative terrain in North India to question this claim. Drawing on research conducted in a provincial town in the North Indian state of Rajasthan, we see that where metropolitan political theorists see ‘transparency’ as promoting discursive and political possibilities, Rajasthani villagers see an exposure which prevents expression, communication and the making of political choices. In their view, it is secrecy and social seclusion that enable political interactions and elicit political judgments. I argue then that the ‘public sphere’ is an unfit heuristic for locating popular politics within (and possibly beyond) Rajasthan, where the category obscures much more than it reveals.