Arnold 1979 Rural Crime in Madras

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Dacoity and rural crime in

Madras, 1860–1940
a
David Arnold
a
School of Oriental and African Studies , London
Published online: 05 Feb 2008.
To cite this article: David Arnold (1979) Dacoity and rural crime in Madras,
1860–1940, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 6:2, 140-167
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066157908438071
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Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras,
1860-1940
David Arnold*
Dacoity in south India was one of the several inter-related forms of rural
crime wth a strong element of social and economic protest, running from
spontaneous looting to banditry as the experimental stage of incipient revolt.

Far from being confined to "criminal tribes", recourse to crime was frequent
and widespread in rural society, especially in response to famine and high
prices, in reaction to the disruptive impact of colonialism, and in the
attempts of declining rural groups to maintain or regain their old pre-
eminence.
In an intriguing passage written in the mid-1940s, Furnivall [1948: 137-41]

described the remarkable proliferation of violent crime in Burma over the
previous sixty years. After the annexation of first Lower and then Upper
Burma there were about twenty years in which, Furnivall noted, 'crime
diminished and the people settled down to a quiet life; dacoity became less
frequent, and its former accompaniments of torture and cold-blooded murder
almost entirely disappeared'. Then a dramatic change set in, and even districts
hitherto 'conspicuously peaceful' became 'conspiciously criminal'. Despite the
strengthening of the police and the introduction of special punitive measures,
the colonial authorities were unable to check the resurgence of dacoity and
violent crime. This trend continued well into the twentieth century, and at a
rate far outstripping the growth of population. Various official explanations
were advanced to explain the rapid growth of crime-'the passionate nature of
the Burman', improved police detection of crime, alcohol, and so forth; but
Furnivall himself believed that this 'abnormal criminality' was essentially a
feature of colonial rule. He agreed with an official report published in 1921 that
the root cause was the transference of land from cultivators to absentee
landlords and the general disintegration and impoverishment of rural society
which had followed British annexation.
Burma was, no doubt, exceptional in South Asia in the scale of land
transference and the high incidence of violent crime during the colonial period.
But one is left wondering how far dacoity in other parts of the region similarly
served as an expression of social dislocation and economic discontent resulting
from colonial intervention. The issue is the more pertinent in that, since the
publication of Hobsbawm's Bandits, several scholars of South Asia [e.g.,
Gough, 1976] have discovered social bandits among Indian dacoits, despite
* School of Oriental and African Studies, London

Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras 141
Hobsbawm's own reservations about the connection between the two. In
Bandits Hobsbawm claimed that it was possible to distinguish from professional
robbers and raiders (the inveterate enemies of the peasants on whom they
preyed) those bandits who were 'not regarded as simple criminals by public
opinion' and whose activities constituted 'a form of individual or minority
rebellion within peasant societies.' Criminals in the eyes of the lord and the
state, among their own people social bandits were seen 'as heroes, as champions,
avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any
case as men to be admired, helped and supported.' Although Hobsbawm
claimed for social banditry a virtual universality in pre-capitalist societies, he
was uncertain about its relevance to the 'peculiar caste-divided societies of
Hindu southern Asia, where social banditry is inhibited by the tendency of

robbers, like ah* other sections of society, to form self-contained castes and
communities.' He asserted that there were 'affinities between some kinds of
dacoits and social bandits'; but, by denying that India's professional robbers
and its 'criminal tribes and castes' qualified as social bandits, he left it by no
means clear whether this brand of banditry existed in India or even which
dacoits most closely resembled social bandits [Hobsbawm, 1969:13-17,31].
To give a wholly satisfactory answer to the question 'were there social
bandits in rural Madras?' it would be necessary to search and sift the folklore
and oral history of south India's villages. That task lies beyond the scope of this
article. It may readily be pointed out that there were occasionally robber
chieftains whose daring exploits and defiance of an unpopular colonial police
force made them heroes of a sort and among more than their own castemen.
One such was Jambulinga Nadar who, until he was shot by the police in
September 1923, was 'known as the Robin Hood of South India, and was a
hero as well as a terror to the people.' [Hatch, 1928:114, Carmichael, 1927]. But
perceptive though his discussion of banditry generally is, Hobsbawm's remarks
about South Asia are unfortunate and misleading. As will be seen later in this
article, dacoit gangs were not always recruited from a single community and
the whole notion of 'criminal tribes and castes' is so saturated with crude
colonial sociology as to provide little insight into the realities of banditry and
rural crime in an Indian context. It must, moreover, be doubted that banditry
can be meaningfully divided from other forms of criminal activity. If some
banditry was 'social' and a 'form of individual or minority rebellion within
peasant societies', so were many other varieties of what entered the colonial
record books as crime.
Rather than take either Hobsbawm's social banditry, or his comments on
Indian banditry, as a framework for analysis, this article will attempt to
describe and explain the incidence of some of the principal types of rural crime
in the Madras Presidency between 1860 and 1940. The basic issue is one
suggested by Furnivall rather than Hobsbawm: was banditry in a colonial
situation like India's a response to novel conditions created by the impact of
colonialism, or did it continue to reflect cyclic phenomena-such as famines
and the periodic breakdown of administrative control-which had existed
before colonialism?
142 The Journal of Peasant Studies
Long-term Trends
The type of banditry which thrived in south India in the late eighteenth
century, when the British first became a substantial land power in the region,
was that which had been common in earlier periods of administrative weakness,
political decay and rivalry between neighbouring states [Richards, 1975:245-
52]. Disbanded soldiers, contending poligars, ousted landlords and chieftains,
freebooters unofficially licensed by one state to prey upon the villages of
another-these were the principals in the banditry which flourished in the
1780s and 1790s.' However, with the British annexation of territories formerly
held by the rulers of Mysore, Hyderabad and the Karnatik, with the suppression
of rebellious poligars in Madurai and Tirunelveli, administrators of the English

East India Company hoped that banditry would enter a rapid decline. Writing
in 1824, Sir Thomas Munro, the Governor of Madras, observed that die high
incidence of violent crime in the annexed territories had not arisen
so much from any thing in the nature of the people, as from the encourage-
ment given to every kind of disorder by a long succession of wars,
misgovernment and anarchy. During those times the sovereign power
[the Karnatik] was too weak to restrain the disorders of its tributaries and
subordinate chiefs: gangs of robbers were protected by every little chief,
and even where they were not protected, they found security, by the
number of petty independent jurisdictions enabling them to escape from
one to the other [Arbuthnot, 1881:30].
Munro reckoned that there were still'several thousand men scattered over our
territory, whose business from their earliest days has been robbery', and that
these men, 'and perhaps their immediate descendents, must pass away before
robbery as a profession can be destroyed' [p. 30].
Munro's optimism was not unwarranted. The steadily increasing power of
the colonial state during the nineteenth century, particularly widi the formation
of a regular police force in 1859, made it more difficult for banditry of a type
which had flourished during periods of administrative weakness to survive.
Although raiding from the princely states continued sporadically until the
1930s, it was far less frequent and disruptive than formerly. From the 1880s
increasingly effective measures were devised to keep watch on dacoits and
border raiders and to arrest and extradite those who tried to shelter in Mysore
and Hyderabad [MPAR, 1910: 31]. The problem of the sovereign power's
control over its 'tributaries and subordinate chiefs' was less easily resolved.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century British police and administrative
control over the province's zamindari tracts was significantly weaker than over
the directly administered ryotwari areas. 'The bonds of authority are very
loose', remarked the District Magistrate of Madurai in 1901 of the district's
two vast zamindari estates [MPAR, 1900: 103]. Similar complaints of the
laxity of zamindari officials and the use of the estates as robbers' sanctuaries
came from North Arcot, another district with a large portion of its land under
zamindars [MPAR, 1886: appx. C, v]. Occasionally, too, zamindars instigated
dacoities for their own financial gain or to injure their rivals. The conviction
and transportation for dacoity in 1880 of the Zamindar of Gandracottah,
reputedly 'one of the arch organisers of crime' in Thanjavur district [MPAR,
1880: SO], was one illustration of the lingering involvement of this class.
Zamindari sponsorship of dacoity appears to have been a less significant
feature of rural crime in Madras than in Bengal, Gujarat and northern India
[e.g., Raychaudhuri, 1969:171-2] where zamindars were more numerous and,
to a degree, more independent. But it will be noticed that the kavalgars
discussed later in this article were partly a declining nobility not dissimilar
from petty zamindars. 2
Although the form of dacoity most immediately vexing to the authorities of
Munro's day was waning during the first half of the nineteenth century as the
government became more secure, other types were not. In the 1850s gang
robberies in the Madras Presidency were running at the rate of between 1,800
and 2,400 a year. It was partly concern at this high rate that prompted the
Madras government to reorganize its police on the lines of the Irish Constabulary
in 1859. But in the 1860s the number of cases of dacoity recorded was still high:
in the six years 1864-69 alone, 4,047 dacoities were reported [Hervey, 1873:
3-4]. Although the crime statistics published by the police from 1863 were
doubtless inaccurate-many crimes went unreported (there were more reliable
ways of recovering stolen cattle than informing the police) and many of those
initially recorded were later struck off as false (being intended to harrass an
enemy or conceal a greater crime)-there is no reason to believe that the figures
fail to show the general pattern of the incidence of dacoity. As the graph shows,
there was neither a straightforward decline during the period 1863 to 1939, nor
the growth of dacoity Furnivall described for Burma. Rather, the pattern is
one of marked fluctuation, with sharp peaks of dacoity in 1866, 1876-8, and
1918-19. These apart, there was a significant decline in the number of cases
reported between the early 1860s and the late 1880s. Thereafter, the figures
began to mount again until 1919 before falling away once more in the 1920s and
1930s.
Apart from the inherent unreliability of the crime statistics, two further
qualifications should be made. Firstly, while the provincial boundaries remained
virtually unchanged during this period, the population increased by roughly
fifty per cent from about thirty millions to forty-six. Accordingly, the incidence
of dacoity per head of population was declining at a faster rate than the graph
indicates. Secondly, dacoity as defined by the Indian Penal Code was robbery
by five or more persons. Under such a general heading a wide variety of crimes
was recorded, many of them different from what is normally thought of as
banditry. Further, by the 1880s many dacoities were said to be of a purely
'technical' nature, that is, a robbery or disturbance involving robbery rather
than the torch-light dacoities of the early and mid-nineteenth century. In this
'heinous' crime, as it was termed in police reports, dacoits carried torches less
to light their way during midnight raids than to terrify and torture their victims
with the blazing brands into revealing where money and jewels were hidden.
Murder, rape and the destruction of property often accompanied dacoity of
this kind. Although torch-light dacoities were becoming rare by the end of the
1600-
1400-
1200
1000
800—
BOO
400
200- 9
70 75 80 85 90 95 1900 05 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
GRAPH 1: DACOITY IN MADRAS PRESIDENCY, 1863-1939
[Source: MPARs 1864-1939]

century, they had not entirely disappeared. But, as will be seen, the imprecise
legal notion of dacoity makes it a useful gauge of popular economic and social
discontent. Because of the numbers involved, dacoity was likely to be more
expressive of minority grievances than individual acts of robbery and murder,
even though the victims of dacoity were not necessarily those most responsible
for the grievance. Dacoity, it might be said, was often a crime midway between
theft and riot.
Famine Crime
The most readily ^identifiable factor in the incidence of dacoity during the
late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was famine-or more exactly, the
drought, dearth and high food prices which generally accompanied it. The
years 1866 and 1876-8 which witnessed such massive outbreaks of dacoity were
times of widespread and severe famine in the Madras Presidency. High crime
rates in the 1890s were also partly attributable to this cause. In 1918-19, though
famine was almost entirely absent, prices were exceptionally high and there
were shortages of essential commodities. The correlation between the agricul-
tural season and high prices on the one hand and grave crime on the other was
so familiar that the Inspector-General of Police invariably prefaced his annual
report on crime with a summary of the year's rainfall and grain prices. In 1877
he identified dacoity as 'the special famine crime', the greater or lesser prevalence
of which in a locality 'was almost always a true index to the state of distress'
[MPAR, 1877: / ] . In 1896 the Inspector-General of Prisons pointed out how,
over the previous twenty-three years, the number of prisoners had risen and
fallen in response to fluctuating grain prices," particularly those of ragi, the
millet most widely consumed by the poorer classes of the province. It is
interesting to note, in view of the long-term decline of dacoity, that he found
that the variations in jail populations in sympathy with grain prices 'have been
less violent in recent years than was the case twenty years ago'. 3
Grain prices and crime shared a yearly cycle. Prices were lowest immediately
after the main harvest in December-January, when most ryots marketed their
grain, and rose steadily during the dry summer months. They reached their
peak early in the new sowing season-June to August-before beginning to fall
in September in anticipation of the next harvest. Crime rates were correspondingly
low at the beginning of the year-grain was comparatively plentiful and cheap,
field labourers were engaged in harvest work, and they and village artisans
received a share of the crop as the main annual payment for their services.
February to June was the 'dacoity season'. During these hot, dry months there
was little or no employment for the poorer villagers; their food stocks shrank as
prices rose. Travellers ventured out while upcountry roads were firm-and
highway-dacoits lay in wait for them. Villagers slept outside from the heat-and
house-dacoits slipped indoors. With the arrival of the south-west monsoon
(June to September) the rains deterred travellers and dacoits alike; and there
was again work in the fields for agricultural labourers [Francis, 1904: 186].
But, if the monsoons failed, panic set in during the last weeks of August and
146 . The Journal ofPeasant Studies
early September. Fear of famine ruled the bazaars. Instead of falling, grain
prices rocketed, sometimes doubling in a few days, and crime rates soared.
From their Indian predecessors the British inherited a policy of state inter-
vention in grain marketing, accepting a duty to regulate prices and facilitate
importation in times of dearth. But by the 1820s the influence of Adam Smith's
writings was being felt, and the Madras government became convinced that
laissez-faire was morally and economically superior to interventionism [Sarada
Raju, 1941:248, 286-91]. District officials who were tempted to yield to local
consumer pressure by urging traders to moderate their prices were sternly
rebuked by the provincial government. Although evidence from the districts
showed that sudden price rises were more often a consequence of merchants'
greed than local scarcity, the government held that high prices were positively
advantageous. They discouraged intending purchasers from consuming grain
'in a greater quantity than is absolutely necessary' and provided the essential
stimulus for traders to import foodgrains from other areas. This policy, it was
recognised, was likely to provoke 'the outrages of the populace', but such
manifestations of the 'impatience of the people' at their 'trifling temporary
inconvenience' were to be firmly suppressed so that merchants would feel
sufficiently confident to import and retail foodgrains.4 State protection was
understandably welcome to the traders; but the government's policy was
unintelligible to those who sought to buy grain only to find prices far beyond
their reach, or none at all on sale because merchants were withholding their
stocks or had sent them elsewhere in pursuit of higher profits.
Popular reaction to abrupt price rises and anticipated famine began with
food riots and looting in the market towns and villages. These largely spontaneous
demonstrations were intended as much to punish the traders for their profit-
eering (by tipping grain into the street and ransacking stalls) as to carry off
grain for consumption. Not infrequently they began when would-be purchasers
failed to obtain redress from officials (whose antipathy to the traders was
nonetheless apparent), and so turned their anger directly against the traders in
the bazaar. The arrival of the police and a magistrate was usually sufficient to
halt the disturbances especially if the traders responded by temporarily
moderating their prices [Arnold, forthcoming].5
There were food riots before the British ruled south India, and several in the
first half of the nineteenth century. But they were probably more frequent in
the second half due to a series of severe famines and the effects of laissez-faire,
greatly exaggerated by the rapid development of a speculative, rail-borne grain
trade of all-India proportions. Between 1860 and 1900 there were, on average,
food riots in one year out of every four. The most widespread were in September
-October 1866 (Madras, Nellore, and Krishna districts), and in October 1876
(Malabar, North Arcot, Godavari, and Kurnool). In 1918-19 almost every
district was affected by looting and rioting; but after 1919 the absence of
widespread famine and the depressed level of grain prices in the 1930s created
conditions generally unfavourable to food riots. There were some in Krishna
and Guntur in September 1931, but, it seems, no others until prices began to
scramble upwards with the outbreak of the Second World War. Riots most
frequently occurred between the end of August and late December, the period
in which the failure of the southwest and northeast monsoons became apparent
and prices rose alarmingly. Because of the greater reliability of their rainfall,
Malabar and South Kanara on the west coast were less susceptible than the
famine-prone central districts or the rice-exporting eastern littoral. With
famine ensconced, food riots died away. There were, for example, no riots in
1877 to follow those of October and December 1876. The first shock and
indignation at high prices passed, and the opening of government relief works
(often prompted by the riots) provided some release from the pressure of
famine on the poor.
Other forms of crime and protest quickly followed the riots and proved more
enduring. One of these was dacoity. In the first seven months of 1876 there
were relatively few cases of dacoity. In Kurnool nine were reported up to the
end of August, 114 in the last four months of the year. In Madurai, where the
impact of drought and dearth was felt a little later, there were seven minor
dacoities up to the end of October, then, as famine struck, thirty-eight in
November and December [MPAR, 1876:26-7]. In 1877 dacoity was rife in the
first six months, with between 100 and 150 cases a month reported. In July and
August, as fear of a second rainless year grew, even that high rate doubled; and
not until the arrival of moderate rains in September and October did dacoity
drop to, and by December fall below, the levels with which the year had
opened [MPAR, 1877: appx. A, Ixxv].
Famine dacoity was often barely distinguishable from looting in the bazaars,
and its participants were said to be 'hungry people not ordinarily criminal.'
Men and women, unable to buy grain in the bazaars, returned, often after
dark, to pillage the houses, granaries and ricemills of wealthy ryots and traders.
Unlike many of die daytime looters, these famine dacoits came specifically to steal
and brought baskets with them to carry off the grain. Convoys of grain carts
passing through the distressed countryside were rarely attacked-hungry
villagers did not seek clashes with the police escorts and patrols to be found on
the highways but easy pickings from unguarded houses where resistance was
seldom encountered. But they shared with the bazaar looters anger and a
craving for revenge, as well as hunger. The scales were tipped from passive
hatred of a local usurer or trader to actual violence against him. Dearth, as
Cobb [1970:215-18] has so eloquently demonstrated for late-eighteentfi century
France, was a great divider; and in rural Madras it opened up a rift, half-
concealed in more prosperous times, between richer villagers and poorer,
between landlord and hired hand, money lender and debtor, grain-grower and
grain-purchaser. Looters and famine dacoits, generally submissive in their
relations with the police and magistracy, were fierce, often merciless, in the
treatment of their local enemies. Speaking of Cuddapah district in 1876, the
Inspector-General of Police remarked: 'It is a singular fact that in cases
committed by ryots and villagers from pure want, extreme cruelty was some-
times shown.' Perhaps the opportunity was taken to pay off scores on a hated
Komaty 6 or moneylender [MPAR, 1876: 26]. In 1917, a year of high prices
locally, villagers of Chodavaram, Krishna district, looted property worth Rs.
8,000 from the house of a rich Komati woman, 'who was disliked by all the
people for her usury'. She was then ducked and nearly drowned in a well and
the other members of the household were ill-treated [MPAR, 1917:14]. The
high tides of famine violence did not run only in one direction: there were
many eddies and cross-currents. In 1878 in Bellary ryots, who had lost two
years' harvests through drought, savagely attacked and mutilated women and
boys found picking a few ears of grain from their fields [MPAR, 1878: 4-5].
Dearth could breed violent men on both sides of a ragged field of cholam.
Although famine is likely to produce banditry in any peasant society, and
certainly did so in pre-colonial India, famine dacoity may have been intensified
by the widening gap between rich and poor in the late-nineteenth century
village India. One important aspect of this was the changing relationship
between landlord and labourer in a famine situation. Formerly, with labour in
short supply and likely to migrate elsewhere if discontented, landlords were
anxious to keep their labourers, even to the extent of distributing part of their
grain reserves to them. As one official remarked of distress in North Arcot
in 1868: 'for the present there is no immediate indication of the farm
servant being turned adrift on to the labour market, always a last resource
in this country; it is threatened however'.7 But by the end of the century
it was common, not a 'last resource'. With land and grain prices rising
from mid-century, with an expanding population and diminishing wastes,
labour was a commodity of declining value to the landlord compared to
the marketable value of his grain. This changing attitude, expressive
of the long-term shift from feudal to capitalist agriculture, gave a
new starkness to landlord-labourer relations. Significantly, many
agricultural labourers resorted to dacoity after being 'turned adrift'
and before seeking employment they would formerly have shunned-in
railway construction gangs, in textile mills, in plantations in the hills or
overseas.8
Food riots and famine dacoity were not simply blind responses to high prices
and dearth. Rather they were protests against perceived injustice by the trader
who profited from anticipated famine or the rich man of the village who no
longer distributed a share of his grain to the landless. It is too often assumed
that in the Indian village power flows from top to bottom, from high caste to
low. Here was a reminder of the coercive power of the poor, for unless the
trader or landlord responded to threats and entreaties by reducing prices or by
charity to the poor, he was likely to be humiliated and robbed.
Food riots and dacoity were not the sum of the complex agrarian reactions to
famine and high prices, but they were the most distinctive. Petty-theft, cattle
stealing and house-breaking also increased, as did the number of suicides and
'accidental deaths' [MPAR, 1877:15-24; 1878:19-29]. The murder rate was
little affected for it reflected other matters-classically, the enraged husband
slaughtering his wife and her lover, the killing of a child or woman for jewels,
of a man for his land-than rainless skies and barren fields. Beyond these,
famine years had a profoundly disruptive effect on rural society, especially
among the landless and the village artisans. They were driven to seek new
employment away from their home village. Or, having fallen back on dacoity
and cattle theft in times of famine, they clung to those pursuits when the dry
years passed, so entering the ranks of the 'professional' and 'habitual' criminals.
Amateurs and Professionals

As head of a new department, charged with the eradication of dacoity, the
Inspector-General of Police was understandably eager to stress the abnormality
of famine crime in 1866 and 1876-8, and to assure the government that there
had been no breakdown of police control over the countryside. He accordingly
emphasised the participation of 'hungry people not ordinarily criminal' in
famine dacoity; noted that, unlike in professional dacoity, firearms and steel
weapons were used only in a minority of cases; and observed that the principal
criminal gangs-Lambadis, Kuravars, and the like-were responsible for no
more than a fraction of the total. Of 980 reported cases of dacoity in 1876, only
132 were attributed to them; in 1877,283 out of 1695 [MPAR, 1876:19; 1877:
20].
As the century progressed and victory in the 'battle against dacoity' proved
elusive, the notion of 'criminal tribes and castes', and their responsibility for a
large share of grave crimes, became increasingly attractive to the colonial,
especially the police, administration. In 1863 William Robinson, the first
provincial Inspector-General of Police, successfully resisted the attempts of
Colonel Charles Hervey to extend the operations of the central Thugi and
Dacoity Department to the Madras Presidency. Gang robberies and dacoities
in Madras had, Robinson claimed, no special features like those in the north
and called for no special solution: 'They are a branch of the ordinary crime of
the country-committed by the ordinary criminal population and to be met by
the ordinary executive and judicial appliances." By the 1870s, Robinson's
successors took a narrower view and were inclined, as their reports on the
famine years showed, to divide the hungry poor, temporarily lured into crime
by want, from the Lambadis, Kuravars and other wandering, criminal gangs.
By the 1890s, under the influence of persistently high crime rates and F.S.
Mullaly's Notes on the Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency (1892), the idea
that certain settled communities, as well as the wandering gangs, were 'habitual'
criminals was becoming firmly entrenched in official thinking. It received a
scholarly gloss and official sanction in the following decades with the publication
of Edgar Thuston's seven volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909)
and the Madras District Gazetteers. On the eve of the First World War the
Madras government reversed Robinson's policy that no special measures were
needed by extending to the province the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911. This
far-reaching legislation became the principal agency during the 1920s and
1930s for the systematic remoulding of a great number of very diverse castes,
tribes and gangs in the Madras Presidency.
The 'criminal tribes and castes' theory was in its way as arbitrary and
misleading as the pigeonholing of castes as 'martial' or 'non-martial races' for
the Indian Army. There was no neat line of demarcation between 'criminal'
and non-criminal castes. In times of famine and high prices crime trawled the
entire lower ocean of rural society and caught within its broad net all those
whose income depended precariously on the monsoon and harvest-landless
labourers and petty ryots most obviously, but also weavers, fishermen and
coolies who could find no market for their goods and services in hard times and
so had no cash with which to buy grain. In non-famine years crime dredged the
ocean floor, but in its catch were to be found a smaller haul of these economically
dependent classes as well as the professional criminals. It was fishermen who
looted the bazaars, stores and grain barges in Madras and Nellore districts in
September 1866; a month later in Krishna the looters were weavers.10 But in
1937, not a particularly unfavourable year, twenty-four fishermen, forming

most of the villagers of Tekkali in Vishakhapatnam, looted Rs. 14,000 from the
house of'an unpopular sowcar [moneylender] to whom they were all indebted'
[MPAR, 1937: 14]. It was said of Pariah and Chuckler dacoits in Nellore in
1876 that they were 'ordinarily greatly dependent on the ryots for their means
of subsistence which was now withdrawn' with the failure of the monsoon
[MPAR, 1876: 29]. But in the eastern districts generally Pariahs and other
untouchable and low-status communities (Pullis, Padayachis, Muslims, and
Malas) were frequent participants in dacoity, sometimes with the encouragement
of the failed monsoon, sometimes with that of wealthier villagers who took a
share of the spoils. The weakness of police administration in the districts,
especially in the 1860s and 1870s, no doubt contributed to the persistence of
low-caste and untouchable crime. It was said in 1871 [MPAR, 1870-71:18-19]
that these local dacoits were not 'hereditary criminals' but had 'become by
practice most expert professional dacoits.' One of the groups of Tamil Pariahs
in Chittoor brought under the Criminal Tribes Act in 1914 was first known to
have engaged in dacoity and other crime during the 1876-8 famine. Since then
its involvement had steadily increased.''
Crime was not, therefore, confined to specific communities. It was resorted
to by the lower third or more of rural society whenever want pressed or
opportunity arose. To speak of 'criminal tribes and castes' obscures the
complex realities of rural crime. It would be more helpful to distinguish
between four different main types of professional criminals. Firstly, as with
the case of the Tamil Pariahs just mentioned, there were low-caste or
untouchable groups who entered crime during periods of famine. Although
the composition of bazaar looters and famine dacoits was usually mixed, with
several communities with similar economic backgrounds acting together, once
the immediate crisis had passed they were likely to fall back into criminal gangs
consisting of one community, or with a core membership drawn from a single
community. Secondly, there were kavalgar groups, whose origins will be
discussed in the next section. These had Maravars and Kallars as their leaders,
but often with lower castes and untouchables as subordinates and accomplices.
For example, in a gang of thirty-eight dacoits broken up by the police in 1876
and drawn from several villages in Madurai and Tirunelveli, five of the leaders
were Maravars and one a Pulli. Among its members were five Maravars, two
Kallars, two Shanars, a Chuckler, and a member of the Idaiyan (shepherd)
caste. 12 Thirdly, there were criminal gangs in which members of one or
several, usually low-ranking, communities were employed by or in other ways
dependent upon higher caste patrons. Finally, there were migrant, tribal and
other socially marginal groups, who might sometimes be hired by or work with
members of other communities, but often operated by themselves.
To take the third type of professional first, in the dry interior districts from
Kurnool to Coimbatore factionalism among the dominant, landholding castes
(especially the Kapus and Gounders) was as violent as it was pervasive. But the
feuding principals rarely took the field against their rivals themselves. Instead
they hired gangs of assassins, recruited from lower branches of their own castes
and from low-status and migrant communities like the Kuravars, to commit
the murders. 13 In northern Vishakhapatnam the Dombs, a low status, semi-
tribal group, were employed by Sundis, local moneylenders, to collect debts
from the cultivating hillmen, Porjas. In this way Dombs 'learn the amount the
Sundi has got stored up. They therefore loot the Sundi's house, explaining that
he takes the Porja's money and they are only taking it back.' The Dombs were
not, therefore, very reliable moneylenders' agents; but, like many other criminal
groups of the kind, they also stole cattle from the hillmen and sold the hides to
merchants who encouraged their activities, especially when the market prices
for hides were high. 14 Much has been written in recent years about the
economic and religious background to the outbreaks and 'fanaticism' of the
Mappillas of Malabar, but Mappilla dacoity has been almost entirely overlooked
- o r simply treated as social banditry [e.g., Dhanagare, 1977: 155]. In fact
Mappillas often operated in communally mixed gangs-of the 257 dacoits
convicted in 1875-6 in Malabar, 158 were Mappillas, 76 Tiyyas, and 18
Nayars 15 -and disposed of their booty to wealthier Mappillas or caste Hindus.
Even though Mappilla dacoity may have become more communally exclusive
towards the end of the nineteenth century, the police believed that 'well-to-do'
Hindus in effect encouraged the predominantly Mappilla dacoity of 1896-7 by
their readiness to receive the gold looted from odier caste Hindus.16 In professional
crime the poor were often the victims, and much of the income from it went not
to enrich the robbers but to high-caste receivers, to merchants and the priests
of temples in which dacoits prayed for success, and to buy the silence of
policemen and village officers.
Among the wandering and tribal communities whose 'criminality' had
become so notorious by the early twentieth century, it is possible to see the
origins or intensification of their criminal activities in the impact of colonial
rule on rural society. The Lambadis, said to be descended from the camp-
followers of Mughal armies in the Dekkan, were once itinerant traders,
carrying salt on the backs of their cattle from the east coast to the interior,
returning with cotton, grain and other goods. In the late eighteenth century
they were among the few traders to risk the dangers of the road in a period of
war and widespread banditry, and as such were valued and granted immunity
from many transit duties and local taxes, even by the East India Company.
With more settled times other trading communities shouldered the Lambadis
aside and the railways finally ousted them from the salt trade [Sarada Raju,
1941: 189-90, 200]. They kept their migrant ways, but turned to cattle-theft
and dacoity, especially when drought dried up the interior pastures. By the
1920s, their salt-carrying days almost forgotten, they were brought under the
Criminal Tribes Act.17
As Superintendent of Operations for the Suppression of Thugi and Dacoity
in the 1860s, Colonel Hervey wrote of the Kuravars that 'in no class with which
we were acquainted had the crime of dacoity been found more completely
systematised and adopted as a hereditary profession, and in none would it be
more difficult of complete eradication' [Hatch, 1928:38]. Damning words; but
Robinson, the Inspector-General of Police, retorted:
The Koravers or Kurchas, on whose propensities Colonel Hervey has

laid exaggerated stress. . ., are the petty carriers (of salt and grain) who
travel with their wares about the country and reside in a few of our
districts. At home and en route they engage in mat-making and such like
Gipsy employments. These races no doubt commit occasional highway
robbery in out of the way places-generally wholly without violence, and
like all Gipsy races they steal when opportunity offers. But they are by no
means the 'professional* dacoits or gang robbers of the c o u n t r y . . . They
are not nearly so much addicted to crimes of violence as the ordinary
Pariah . . . or even Sudras and Mussulmans of the districts where the
crime of gang robbery is rifest.I8
Major C.S. Hearn, Inspector-General in 1868, was hopeful that despite the loss
of their carrying trade the Kuravars would 'gradually settle down to other
pursuits' [MPAR, 1867-8: 8]. But subsequently generations of police officers
viewed the Kuravars less charitably. The Uppu Kuravars, the sub-caste most
closely identified with the salt trade, were most frequently convicted of dacoity
and brought under the Criminal Tribes Act in the 1920s. In a characteristic
statement, one police superintendent described an Uppu Kuravar gang in
Salem as a 'dangerous sect [sicl] always addicted to crime'.19 Hatch [1928:38,
260] in his account of the Kuravars as cunning but unprincipled rogues, who
needed a stiff dose of the Criminal Tribes Act to cure them of their 'moral and
spiritual disease', cited Hervey's opinion of them with approval, but made no
mention of Robinson's rejoinder. It was either a measure of how far Kuravar
crime had intensified since the 1860s or the degree to which official perceptions
had shifted.
Forest and hill-dwellers were other groups whose traditional occupations
were effected by economic innovations introduced by the British. Prohibitions
on the traditional shifting cultivation of the hillmen of Gudem in Vishakhapatnam
contributed to the rising in the hills in 1922-4.20 In addition to the failure of
monsoons, which was always likely to drive them out from the forest in search
of food, many tribals were obliged by forest laws to work for contractors
harvesting forest products or seek employment outside the forests as agricultural
labourers and domestic servants. Many in practice turned to dacoity, house-
breaking and murder. It was said of one such displaced tribal group, the
Yanadis of Chittoor, that increasing contact with the world beyond the forests
gave them an appetite 'to improve their status, wear better clothes and secure
more and better food.' Their dacoities included the theft of goats, rice and
other foodstuffs that were not part of their traditional diet.21
In recommending the inclusion of the Yanadis under the Criminal Tribes
Act, Chittoor's European police superintendent wrote: 'They are not in the
habit of doing any hard work nor do they take up cultivation in right earnest'."
In such a judgment it was overlooked that tribal and migrant communities like
the Yanadis, Lambadis and Kuravars had no tradition of settled agriculture
and rarely the resources, if they wanted to plough and sow, to buy sufficient
land for their support. In a pattern familiar from the whiteman's treatment of
detribalised and dislocated indigenes in North America, southern Africa and
Australasia, British and high-caste Hindu police officers displayed a contempt

for the lifestyle of nomads, tribals and low-status communities generally.
Their 'laziness', 'unwillingness to work', refusal to 'see what was good for
them', their consumption of alcohol, drugs and 'inferior' types of food, their
'peculiar' social practices-these were as influential in branding them 'criminal
tribes' as any record of proven criminal activity. Into causes and reasons, police
officers did not believe it their job to enquire: they had to maintain 'law and
order'. But once the Criminal Tribes Act had been imposed on a gang, a tribe,
or a sub-caste, its lifestyle was rapidly and drastically transformed. Confined to
a single settlement, kept under close surveillance, or obliged to report frequendy
to a police station, they wove mats and baskets, quarried stone, picked tea on
hill plantations, tended factory looms, or built railway embankments. Their
children were sent to government or missionary schools and prohibited from
marrying 'known depredators'. Loans for cattle and wells, land grants, seeds
and ploughs from co-operative societies were offered as inducements to eschew
crime. And, in time, the combination of police coercion and economic incentives
was successful in transforming erstwhile dacoits and cattle-thieves into plant-
ation coolies, factory hands and small farmers-in short, made them a productive
part of the new economic order.
Kaval
Thus far our main concern has been with crimes committed by members of
communities low on the social scale and in protest against, or in reaction to,
their disadvantaged position. But an important part of crime in the Madras
Presidency was entangled with the survival of a system known as kaval in
which petty ryots and shepherds were usually the victims and members of
formerly dominant groups the perpetrators.
Before 1800 rural policing in south India was the responsibility of two
agencies, the talaiyari and the kavalgar. The talaiyari resembled the chowkidar
of northern India: he was a village watchman whose principal duties were to
guard crops, keep an eye on strangers passing through the village, assist in the
collection of revenue, detect thieves, and recover stolen property. Although
the office was basically hereditary, an incompetent talaiyari could be fined by
the village community or replaced by a more promising kinsman. There were
one or two talaiyaris, according to a village's size, and they were low-caste
Hindus or untouchables. For their services they were paid a fixed share of the
harvest (the rate varying from one area to another). The talaiyari's direct
responsibility was to the headman, but, if the principle of collective responsibility
was as thoroughly enforced as later writers believed, an entire village could be
fined if it harboured a thief or murderer and failed to produce him for
punishment. Threat of fines and the talaiyari's intimate knowledge of every
household-its lands, its honest income, its enemies-were invaluable aids to
the prevention and detection of rural crime.
The kavalgar, by contrast, was originally a state appointee and seldom
resided in the village from which he drew his kaval, or protection, fees. Usually
from a higher caste than the talaiyari, the kavalgar was responsible for several
villages and for the markets, roads and wastelands associated with them. In
addition to receiving a substantially larger share of the harvest than the lowly
talaiyari, the kavalgar's income was supplemented by transit duties on goods,
market fees and special assessments on the villagers' land and property. If in
association with the talaiyaris, who were in this respect his subordinates, the
kavalgar failed to recover stolen property, he might be fined all (or more
usually an agreed part of) the value of the lost item.
Although under the Vijayanagar empire and its Nayak successors, the right
to collect kaval payments was assigned to an individual as a reward for his
services to the state or as a way of transferring irksome police duties from the
central government to trusted local landholders and officials, over time the
system degenerated. In many cases the initial appointees and their heirs chose
subordinate kavalgars to do the work and collect the fees on their behalf. There
thus arose a distinction between the chief (men-) and petty (kudi-) kavalgars.
The latter were recruited from warrior castes and armed retainers, like the
Kallars and Maravars, or from those who already had criminal reputations,
like the Kuravars, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. In the
southern districts of Tiruchirapalli, Madurai and Tirunelveli, the menkavalgars
were poligars who jealously guarded their kaval rights as one of the principal
sources of their wealth and power. With the breakdown of control by the
Karnatik Nawabs in the mid-eighteenth century, the menkavalgars ceased to
offer much protection to the villages, but sent out their agents to exact large
sums 'from defenceless villagers as the price of their forebearing to plunder
them' [Caldwell, 1881: 104-51. Ryots who showed reluctance to pay were
tortured, flogged or robbed of their cattle and grain.23
Encountering the kaval system as a bastion of poligar power, the East India
Company soon equated it with oppression and misgovernment. The Company's
land revenue settlements made at the beginning of the nineteenth century
sought to demolish the menkavalgars: in exchange for the grant of lands and
sometimes pensions, they were to renounce all claims to kaval fees and police
authority. The kudikavalgars were likewise pensioned off, or transformed into
local police in Company pay and barely distinguishable from talaiyaris. Kaval
was not exactly outlawed, but the assumption was that under the warming rays
of 'civilized' government it would melt away.
It did not, and for this there were three main reasons. The British failed to
create a rival police system sufficiently powerful to oust the kavalgars and
protect the ryots; the lesser kavalgars lacked, or refused to consider, alternative
sources of income; and the power and prestige of the Maravars and Kallars was
so closely bound up with kaval that they clung to it tenaciously.
The East India Company's contribution to rural policing in the first half of
the nineteenth century was largely negative and destructive. It alienated and
impoverished the talaiyaris by depriving them of their traditional fees and any
service lands (inams) they had formerly held, offering instead a wholly inadequate
state stipend. Fines to enforce collective village responsibility for crimes were
abolished; the obligation of talaiyaris to pay compensation for stolen goods was
swept away. In consequence, talaiyaris deserted their hereditary calling, or,

now that the deterrents had gone, used their expertise for criminal gain.24 Here
again the disruptive effect of colonialism was a stimulus to rural crime. Such
police measures as the Company devised were dictated by its own revenue and
security priorities. Sibbendi corps, consisting of Indian sepoys captained by
European army officers, assisted regular troops in collecting revenue from the
recalcitrant, in suppressing minor disturbances, and in consolidating British
rule in restive areas. It was not until 1859, with the formation of a civilian
constabulary, that more effective policing began to be introduced and some
attempt made to revive the talaiyaris.
But the damage had already been done. Maravar and Kallar kavalgars in the
southern districts either persisted in exercising their kaval rights or turned
instead to dacoity and cattle-theft. In Tiruchirapalli, where the menkavalgars'
fees had been commuted in 1817, the District Magistrate complained in 1883
that they
continue to extort fees from villages, nominally as payment for the
protection they undertake to afford them from robbery . . .; but it is
perfectly understood between the parties, that it is given in reality to save
the cattle of the village from being driven off by the agents of the very
persons who engage to protect the inhabitants from depredation.25
Kaval during the nineteenth century constituted a rival system of rural control
to that of the British, and the colonial regime could not feel itself master of the
countryside until it had been eradicated. In one of many such statements made
by officials during the century, Major C.S. Hearn of the Madras police
minuted on kaval in Tirunelveli in 1861 that it was 'incompatible with a just
and enlightened administration' and 'cannot last'. 'There may', he added, 'be
difficulty in breaking through traditionary custom, and in reducing a confused
mass of robber police within controllable limits; but, sooner or later, the
difficulty must be faced and overcome'.26
Ironically, the kaval system in Tirunelveli outlasted the colonial period.
Despite the appointment of special police inspectors from 1874 to 1892 to
combat dacoity in Madurai and Tirunelveli and the use of branding to discourage
cattle-theft, the police made little headway against Maravar and Kallar crime until
the introduction of the Criminal Tribes Act. If a ryot refused to pay a ransom,
known as tuppukuli, for the restitution of his stolen cattle and filed a complaint with
the police, he would probably suffer twice over. Police detection was so poor that
he was unlikely to see his cattle again and might be subjected to police harrassment
and the delays and expense of legal action to no effect. In addition, his audacity in
going to the police instead of a kavalgar or some other intermediary would be
punished by further theft, dacoity and arson. Numerically weak, underpaid and
corrupt, drawn from classes traditionally subordinate to the Maravars and Kallars,
the constabulary was itself in awe of the kavalgars. A conscientious officer who
tried to break a robber chieftain might well share the fate of Sub-Inspector
Srinivasa Rao of Palayankottai division in 1883-dacoited on a dark night, his
incriminating records stolen, and insufficient evidence against his Maravar and
Pariah attackers to obtain their conviction in court [MPAR, 1883:120; Winfred,

1914:9-24}.
Although historically Kallar and Maravar crime was rooted in the kaval
system, economic factors were instrumental in determining where it survived
and where it decayed. After about 1850 those who kept kaval alive were not the
former poligar menkavalgars, but lesser, poorer men for whom the profits and
prestige of being kavalgars were proportionately more important. In Thanjavur,
where Kallars constituted a sizeable part of the population, there was a steady
drift away from kaval and crime generally as Kallars benefitted from the
extension of irrigation, from cash-cropping and the sale of land by Brahmins
migrating to the cities. In their ritual and social practices the Kallars increasingly
emulated the Vellalas and Brahmins. Over the past twenty years, reported
Thanjavur's District Judge in 1895 in opposing the introduction of criminal
tribes legislation against the Kallars, there had been a 'distinct improvement'.
' . . . numbers of Kallars have settled down permanently to peaceful and lawful
occupations and many of them (significant sign) try to hide their origin by
calling themselves 'Pillais'. What more can we want?'27 The district's Kallar
thieves now came from outside the irrigated areas-from the dry taluks and
districts to the south and from the princely state of Pudukkottai.
In Madurai, too, the Kallars of Kilnadu, to the east of the district town,
fairly soon lost interest in kaval fees and dacoity once the waters of the Periyar
irrigation scheme reached their lands in 1896. By contrast, the Piramalai
Kallars in Melnadu, to the west of Madurai town, were bypassed by the
scheme and remained trapped in their traditional ways. Tirumangalam taluk,
of which Melnadu formed a part, was one of the areas hardest hit by the 1876-8
famine, losing 15.6 per cent of its population between the 1871 and 1881
censuses [Census, 1881:280]; and for the following forty years drought continued
to thwart productive agriculture. In the Melnadu village of Sorikkampatti in
1911 there were ninety adult males, all but a few of them Piramalai Kallars.
Eighty-four owned or shared lands totalling forty-seven 'wet' acres and 315
'dry'. This, it was noted in 1914, was 'quite insufficient for their maintenance',
especially as the village tank, which ought to have provided irrigation water,
had been empty for most of the previous ten years due to drought. In
neighbouring Urappanur, the story was much the same: 315 adult male
Piramalais with 760 'dry' acres and 340 that were, only in name, 'wet'. The
tank 'rarely receives sufficient water to even partially fill it.' In both villages
crime and kaval fees kept the Piramalais alive. In Sorikkampatti thirty-nine of
the adult males had been convicted, twelve others bound over, with many
other crimes throughout the southern districts attributed to them but unproved.
Urappanur had a similar record. In addition, fourteen of its families collected
kaval fees from their own and nearby taluks. 28
The British were not unaware that in the long term 'material progress,
education, and improved means of communication and intercourse' were the
most likely solvents of Maravar and Kallar 'criminality'.29 But they were often
unwilling to invest the time, energy and capital required to promote the
necessary changes-such as bringing Periyar water to Melnadu. For impatient
police superintendents with bulging crime dossiers, the Criminal Tribes Act
appeared to offer a speedier and cheaper solution than what today would be
called rural development. It was against the Piramalai Kallars that the Act was
most rigorously enforced, and by 1928 nearly 36,000 Piramalais had been
registered.30 Apart from a few notorious gangs and villages, the Maravars
escaped systematic registration-partly because the 'Kallar Reclamation
Scheme' in Madurai proved so demanding that the British baulked at trying to
repeat the experiment among the Maravars, and partly because, unlike the
Piramalais, the Maravars had zamindars and traditional caste leaders whose
political allegiance the government was anxious to retain and through whom it
hoped to control the poorer castemen.31 It was not until the early 1940s that it
began seriously to consider the economic development of Tirunelveli in ways
that would undermine the kavalgars. By then it was the end of colonialism,
rather than kaval, that was in sight.
For those Kallars and Maravars with only a few dusty acres to till, the kaval
system kept alive cherished and ancient traditions of soldering, defiant
independence and rural ascendency [Blackburn, 1978]. Their pride, prestige
and authority were interwoven with it. To abandon kaval would be an unaccept-
able admission of their own decline. 'The Maravar', wrote Tiruchirapalli's
Sessions Judge in 1895, 'is a fighting man, who owing to Pax Brittanica, has
degenerated into a thief . . . He is an impoverished gentleman, averse to
emigration or to manual labour but not above cattle-lifting when a convenient
opportunity arises.' 32 For Kallars and Maravars alike, a daring dacoity or
cattle-theft was a mark of manliness, worthy of praise not condemnation; and
'a Kalla maiden has been known to refuse a suitor in marriage until he had
proven his mettle by an exploit in crime'.33 To be a kavalgar connoted enormous
prestige among peers and authority among lesser men-so much so that in
Tirunelveli's Maravar villages line of factional cleavage often ran between
those who were kavalgars and those who aspired to be. 34
But time, and economic change, would not stand still for the kavalgars' sake,
and towards the end of the nineteenth century they were confronted by two
challenges to their ascendency. With some encouragement from Christian
missionaries and the police, members of the Konar and Idaiyan shepherd
castes in Madurai and Tirunelveli defied the kavalgars by refusing to pay kaval
fees and organizing their own protection. This began about 1896 and caused a
spate of riot, murder, arson and dacoity as the kavalgars struggled, partly
successfully it would seem, to reassert their control [MPAR, 1896:3-4; 1906:
9]. The second challenge came from the Shanars, or Nadars as they were
becoming known. The Maravars, as kavalgars, poor ryots and sub-tenants,
found the newly acquired wealth of Shanar traders and moneylenders as
galling as their Kshatriya 'pretensions'; and for once the Maravars had the
sympathy of many other caste Hindus. The attack on the Shanar residents of
the town of Sivakasi in June 1899 was the start of a wave of dacoities against
Shanars throughout Tirunelveli and Madurai. The Maravars' antipathy found
further expression in the looting of Shanar traders in 1918 during the provincial
'epidemic' of food riots in that year.35 By the 1920s and 1930s the Maravars
were facing yet another challenge, this time from untouchables, influenced by
Gandhi and provincial politicians, trying to assert economic and social rights in
opposition to the Maravars. A further upsurge of Maravar crime and violence
followed.
It is revealing of both British and Kallar-Maravar attitudes to kaval and
crime that, following a riot in April 1920 in which fourteen Piramalais of
Perungamanallur village were killed resisting registration under the Criminal
Tribes Act, the Deputy Inspector-General, Southern Range, wrote that the
Piramalais had been 'under the impression that the so-called Kallar Raj was
paramount.' The outcome of the riot 'has done a great deal to improve the
position of Government and its officials and perhaps more important still has
inspired the non-Kallar population with confidence in Government and has
struck a blow at the power of the Kallars.'36 In similar vein, the Inspector-
General remarked that the riot had 'effected a revolution in the attitude of the
Kallars towards Government which for long has been one of defiance . . .'
[MPAR, 1920:16]. Between the Kallars and Maravars on one side and their
British and Indian antagonists on the other, kaval and related crime were no
less than a struggle for rural supremacy.
Bandits and Rebels

In most instances rural crime and dacoity had a very limited function
-anger, revenge, profit-and an inner logic which made them unable to develop
into broader protest movements or insurrection. To take the case of food riots
and famine dacoity again, these often demonstrated a sharp division between
rural rich and poor and, over time, might help to fix attitudes on both sides of
the divide. But looters generally went no further than ransacking a bazaar and
humiliating traders whom they suspected of profiteering. The traders' response
was often such as to discourage further disturbances-prices were reduced,
albeit temporarily, and sometimes the charitable distribution of foodgrains
was organized. The looters were thus appeased. If they were not, they turned
to dacoity, which again had its own limited objectives, rather than launch a
systematic campaign against traders, moneylenders and other exploiters.
There were, however, two situations (sometimes coinciding) which were
conducive to the transformation of rural crime and dacoity into broader
movements. One was evidence (or simply rumour) of administrative break-
down; the other the presence of an ideology into which the immediate
grievance could be fitted. The first takes us back to the point at which this
paper began. In general, as we have seen, the colonial regime was emerging
from the period of administrative weakness in the late eighteenth century and
becoming progressively stronger during the nineteenth. But there continued
to be areas where the terrain and minimal integration into the colonial economic
and political system continued to prevent effective government control. The
Mappilla taluks of eastern and southern Malabar were one illustration of this;
the hill tracts of the northeast, discussed in this section, an even more striking
example. Geographical areas apart, there were periods when the government
was, or appeared to some villagers to be, on the verge of collapse. Although the
mutiny and rebellion of 1857-8 did not touch the province directly, it appears
to have stimulated the dacoity of the late 1850s and small-scale rebellions on
the west coast (Kanara) and in the northeast. Similarly, both the world wars
produced an upsurge of dacoity. Wartime inflation may partly explain this, but
the widespread belief that the British regime was crumbling and the Germans
and Japanese poised to drive them out contributed at least as much. In this
sense, then, we are brought back to dacoity as a cyclic phenomenon, always
present, but ready to burst out in strength whenever actual or presumed
government weakness signalled an opportunity. Ideology as a factor conducive
to the enlargement of dacoity into rebellion usually took the form of religion or
a persistent sense of local identity, history and culture. The result could be
paradoxical. The Islam of the Mappillas caused them to shrug off other,
non-Muslim, groups with whom (as their dacoity showed) they had many
grievances and interests in common. And despite the nationalist overtones in
the hill risings of the northeast, they depended too much on local traditions to
be communicable to the neighbouring plains. As the Mappilla risings have
been investigated by other writers, a brief account of the dacoity and risings in
the northeast will be given here.
Between 1845 and 1924 there was a series of risings, known as fituris, in the
Gudem and Rampa hills of the Vishakhapatnam and Godavari Agency tracts.
These were usually preceded by outbreaks of dacoity. The area presented the
British with a peculiarly awkward problem of control. It was difficult of access,
the heavy monsoon rains hampered transport for much of the year, and malaria
and other diseases quickly incapacitated the police and troops the British
brought up from the plains to fight the risings. The hillmen themselves would
not enter the police and other government agencies, and so the division
between rulers and ruled was sharp. Beyond Gudem, along what is now the
border between Andhra and Orissa, lay other knots of hills and a jumble of
administrative divisions which made the task of rounding up fleeing fituridars
(rebels) formidable, if not impossible, without large numbers of troops and an
intimate knowledge of the terrain. Economically, the area was one of the most
neglected in the province. The main British interest was in the sale, through
contractors, of opium and toddy. There were no planters to open up these hills
as they were those of Malabar, the Nilgiris and Coimbatore. Even in the 1920s
there were few roads, towns or schools. Control over the area was, therefore,
exceptionally weak and banditry could flourish there as almost nowhere else in
rural Madras.
For the hillmen (who consisted of Koya tribals as well as two caste-Hindu
groups, the Bagathas and Kondas Doras) there were two main targets of
hostility. The first was the Malas, who as moneylenders and traders from the
plains attracted that fierce enmity of the rural poor and landless already seen in
the context of famine crime, and who as untouchables risen to wealth and
influence were as dear to the hearts of hillmen as the Madurai and Tirunelveli
Shanars were to the Maravars. In one typical dacoity in 1900, sixty to eighty
Bagathas looted the rich Mala village of Jerrala in Gudem. As 'lords of the
hills', as a branch of the proud Kapu caste of cultivators, and, less grandly, as
debtors, the Bagathas viewed with resentful and envious eyes the growing
prosperity of the Malas.37 In the neighbouring Koraput hills in the 1880s
hillmen dacoited and massacred Mala traders and their example helped to
touch off the Gudem fituri of June 1886. Hill priests, called Sivasaris, egged on
the Gudem hillmen against the untouchable traders 'whom they all hate,
because all are in debt to them and because they are usurping a position for
which their want of caste does not fit them.' 38
British rule was the second target. Not that any Europeans lived in the
damp, malarial Agency: even the Agent and his European assistants spent no
more time there than the government obliged them to. But British rule was
identified with the corrupt police imported from the plains, the courts in which
hillmen could either not afford or not obtain their justice, the officials who
exacted bribes and unpaid compulsory labour, the forest officials who restricted
shifting cultivation and prohibited the collection of fuel and building materials
from the forests. These grievances underlay several fituris, notably those of
1886 and 1922-4 [Venkatarangaiya, 1965:366-9].
The traditions and religious beliefs of the hillmen, as well as their mutual
grievances, bound them together, despite differences of caste and status, in
opposition to the British and Malas. During the months before a fituri, rumours,
rich with legend and millenarian prophecy, swept the hills. Holy men preached
the imminent fall of the British Raj and the restoration of the ancient hill
kingdoms. There were pilgrimages to holy places in the hills, sacrifices and
oaths, miracles, or the report of them. Gods were reincarnated to lead the
hillmen against their Mala and British oppressors. In 1886 a young hillman
called Surla Ramanna was hailed as Sri Rama, and Rajana Anantayya, 'a
regular rolling stone', a former police constable and teacher, declared himself
to be the Hanuman who would lead a Rama Dundu (Rama's army) against the
latter-day Ravana. Both 'Rama' and 'Hanuman' were visited by credulous
villagers and 'regular worship was paid to them.' 39
In such a charged atmosphere personal grievance readily broadened into
rebellion with dacoity the link between them. Janni Kakari, a Konda Dora,
who emerged as one of the leading fituridars in 1886, had been deprived of
patrimonial lands at the foot of the Gudem hills through the machinations of
his rival, Yella Venkiah, in collusion with subordinate government officials. In
retrospect, the Agent for Vishakhapatnam believed that Kakari was unjustly
treated, but at the time he could get no justice from the courts and resolved to
murder Venkiah in revenge. In the hill village of Sadiki he joined other
malcontents and outlaws who were already agitated by priestly prophecies of
the end of the whiteman's rule. Kakari promised to join them in afituri if he
could first settle with Venkiah. With seven or eight Sadiki men he dacoited and
burnt Venkiah's house, killed one of his servants, but failed to slay his
arch-enemy. The dacoity was a characteristic testing of the water. The police
were slow to investigate the case and seek out Kakari. Emboldened by this
evidence of administrative weakness-surely proof that British rule was
moribund-on 16 June 1886, thirteen days after the raid of Venkiah, an
enlarged band of Sadiki men attacked the police station at Gudem. They called
themselves Rama Dundu and, in their assault, cried out "Govindu, Govindu".
Without a fight the police abandoned the station, and their carbines and
ammunition were seized by the dacoits. The sacking of a police station, the
most tangible evidence of British oppression and almost the only source of
arms, was in this as in other fituris the signal for dacoity to merge into a broader
uprising by the hillmen against the British.40
In a second sense, too, dacoity was a testing of the water. If, as in 1891, the
police moved quickly and a rising had only recently failed, dacoity failed to
develop into/mm. But if, as in 1886, the police response was sluggish and
several years' grievances had accumulated since the last uprising, the hillmen
felt confident enough to join in the attacks on police and troops or to participate
in the looting of Malas. Preliminary dacoity also tested the support of the
muttadars, estate-holders appointed by the British to keep the hillmen in order.
Although the muttadars made themselves unpopular by rack-renting and
enforcing compulsory labour, they too were heavily and resentfully indebted
to the Malas and fretful under British control. In every fituri there were one or
two who joined the rebels, many more who sympathized or feared the con-
sequences if they did not side with the fituridars. Ex-muttadars, dismissed for
complicity in earlier risings, their heirs and claimants, dispossessed landholders
like Kakari-these were a ready and valuable source of leadership once dacoity
began to border on rebellion. Rajana Anantayya, the 'Hanuman' of 1886,.
wrote not only to muttadars for their support but also to the Maharaja of Jaipur,
the premier zamindar of the Agency tracts. Though never delivered, his letter
(originally in Telugu) is a revealing mixture of entreaties and threats, and rare
documentation of the ideas and objectives of the fituri leaders. It ran:
Sree Ramulu
To the feet (that resemble lotus flower) of the Maha Rajastry Sree
Jeypore Zillah Rajah, Ramachendraderu Maharajah
Hanumanaswamy writes
You have been reigning the country all these years. Is it good, if the
English be in our country? The English eat our money, but imprison us,
and arrest those Rajahs who oppose them and send them to 'Bancole'.
Therefore, constables, etc., in your taluk are doing great injustice to the
people. You are a very quiet gentleman and therefore have reigned the
country so long. Now if you order me for the English, I will, in an Indian
hour, take Koraput and overcome the constables in a minute. I make war
in all (four) countries, if I only get your full permission. It is said that
death is sure some day, though we live any number of days. Our name
and renown will last for ever. We therefore should wage war with the
English. The Russians also are troubling the English. If the assistance of
men and arms are supplied to me, I will play the Ram's part. I beg for
your orders in reply to this. 41
At the time of the 1922-4 fituri government officials claimed that that rising
was distinct from all previous ones because it was led by a Kshatriya, Sitarama
Raju, from the plains who had avowedly nationalist intentions. But, as Rajana
Anantayya's letter makes clear, the risings had long had nationalist as well as
religious overtones; and Anantayya, if not born in the plains, had certainly
lived and received education there. Sitarama Raju's fituri merely added new
embellishments and more openly announced its nationalist ambition-to be the
starting point for an all-India war of liberation from the British. Although
attacks on police stations were as usual opening moves in the 1922 rising,
Sitarama Raju issued the novel instruction to his followers not to harm Indian
subordinates as not they, but their British officers, were the hillmen's enemies.
And, as perhaps befitted a Kshatriya bandit chief who expressed admiration
for Gandhi but not for his non-violence, Sitarama Raju wore a turban, boots
and red khaddar (hand-woven cloth), had a flowing beard, and a captured
police revolver tucked in his Sam Browne belt [Venkatarangaiya, 1965:382-8].
The grievances behind his fituri, the character of its participants, the religious
and nationalist sentiments expressed, were all part of the fituri tradition.
Conclusion
Broadly speaking, there were two sets of factors which determined the incidence
of dacoity and related rural crime in Madras between 1860 and 1940. One was
cyclic. Famine was a major cause of crime and disturbances, especially in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, and its effect often outlasted the
immediate crisis. Another cyclic phenomena was the breakdown or anticipated
disintegration of government control, though this was less apparent during the
period under consideration than in a wider timespan, say 1750 to 1950. The
second set of factors were innovative and reflected the impact of colonialism on
rural society. Some of these were relatively transient. For example the railways,
which had the effect of undermining the salt trade of the migrant Lambadi
traders, in the long term contributed to the overall decline of banditry.
Railways, and more especially all-weather roads and motor buses (which
effected something of a transport revolution in rural Madras in the 1920s and
1930s), opened up passes and jungle tracts that were once dacoits' lairs and
robbers' sanctuaries. The tea and coffee plantations of the Kerala-Tamil Nadu
border had a comparable effect. British colonial policies and administrative
changes also tended in the short term to stimulate rural crime, either, like the
decay of the pre-colonial rural police system, by damaging a valuable traditional
institution and driving its members towards crime, or, as in the case of
laissez-faire, by pursuing a policy which exaggerated the effects of drought and
dearth on the poorer villagers. The transition from feudal to capitalist agriculture,
and particularly its effect on landlord-labourer relations, was one increasingly
important consequence which stemmed from colonialism. But it is more
clearly seen in the so-called Green Revolution of the present day than in late
nineteenth and early twentieth century India.
Four main types of rural crime and dacoity can be distinguished. Firstly,
famine crime. Popular demonstrations and violent crime were standard responses
to famine, dearth and high prices. Presaged by bazaar looting, famine crime
took the form of attacks on traders and moneylenders. In this there was a
strong element of protest and revenge against usury and speculation-as well as
the looting of food by hungry people. At such times the divide between
moneylender and debtor, grain-trader and grain-purchaser ran like a great rift
valley through the geography of rural society. But fierce and vindictive though
this crime could be, its energies were soon dissipated. The participants turned
not to broader peasant rebellion but to dacoity, cattle-theft and pilfering.
Emigration, famine relief works, charity, the debilitating effect of hunger, the
ravages of the diseases that crowded in famine's train-all these combined with
the limited objectives of famine crime to prevent the emergence of broader,
more dynamic movements.
Secondly, professional crime. To some extent, where indebtedness pressed
or administrative weakness allowed, famine crime was carried over into years
of comparative prosperity. A particularly biting period of famine, like that of
1876-8, might reawaken dormant criminal traditions among the lower strata of
village society or be the starting point for their protracted involvement in
crime. But more decisive in the inception or intensification of this variety of
crime were the advent of railways, the introduction of restrictive forest regulations
and the disruption of the traditional police organization. Migrants and tribals,
groups marginal to mainstream society, found it hardest to adjust to these sorts
of changes and, perhaps, easiest to turn to crime as their principal source of
income. Unlike famine crime, professional crime was not discriminating: its
victims were often poor and its patrons men of wealth and social standing.
Kaval, the third main type of crime discussed, was to some extent a variant
of professional crime. But quite apart from its economic aspects and the
weakness of British rural law enforcement which it demonstrated, the kaval
system was an attempt to keep things as they were in a changing world, or, in a
world turning sour, to revive a more glorious age in which the criminals of
today were the lords of yesterday. The more the balance turned against the
Maravar and Kallar kavalgars, and the more defiant the shepherds, Shanar
traders, and untouchables became, so the more fiercely the kavalgars fought to
maintain their old pre-eminence.
The fourth type of crime which can be identified concerns dacoity as the
prelude to insurrection. In the case of the Gudem and Rampa hills in the
northeast of the province, dacoity was directed against both the 'upstart' Mala
(untouchable) traders and the intruding features of British rule. Because of the
frailty of colonial control over the area and its strong hill traditions, dacoity
periodically broadened into popular risings or fituris. Mappilla crime in Malabar
showed similar characteristics. But where the fituris broadened outwards to
embrace hillmen of various castes and social position, the dacoity of the
Mappillas turned inwards to Islam, shrugging off association with other
oppressed and crime-disposed communities that were not Muslim, and finding
expression in purely communal acts of defiance and rebellion.
NOTES
1. For the background and career of one bandit chief of the period, see Alexander Read, 'An
Account of Robberies in the Baramahl', Baramahal Records, XVI, Tamil Nadu Archives
Madras (hereafter TNA).
2. I owe this point to David Hardiman. I am grateful to him and to Gyanendra Pandey for
criticism of an earlier draft of this essay.
3. A.G. Cardew to Chief Secretary, Madras, 22 May 1896, Government) O(rder) 1026,
M(adras) J(udicial) P(roceedings), 19 June 1896, India Office Library, London (hereafter
IOL).
4. Board of Revenue to Collector, Nellore, 30 Dec. 1811, reprinted in Board of Revenue
Proceedings, 1349, 4 Mar. 1864, TNA.
5. For an account ofa typical grain riot, see that in Kurnool town on 5 Nov. 1891, in MJP, 2354,
16 Nov. 1891, and 2363, 18 Nov. 1891, IOL.
6. Komatis are a caste of Telugu traders.
7. W. Robinson to Chief Secretary, 5 Jan. 1868, India Public Proceedings, 79, 28 Mar. 1868,
IOL.
8. For emigration, see MPAR, 1876: appx. C, xx, and Sub-Collector, Chingleput, to Collector,
31 Oct. 1876, Madras Revenue Proceedings, 258, 15 Nov. 1876, IOL; and for the drift of
labour to the railways, Agent, South Indian Railway, to Consulting Engineer, 5 Feb. 1877,
Madras Revenue Proceedings, 817, 27 Feb. 1877, IOL.
9. Robinson to Chief Secretary, 10 Nov. 1863, MJP, 60, 8 Dec. 1863, IOL.
10. Inspector-General to Chief Secretary, 17 Sept. 1866, MJP, 224, 24 Sept. 1866; Joint
Magistrate, Krishna, To District Magistrate, 13 Oct. 1866, MJP, 38, 3 Nov. 1866, IOL.
11. Note by Police Superintendent, Chittoor, G.O. 381, Judicial, 14 Feb. 1914, IOL.
12. Police Superintendent, Madurai, to Inspector-General, 22 Sept. 1876, MJP, 62, 10 Oct.
1876, IOL.
13. For a gang of Kapu and Boya assassins in Cuddapah, see Inspector-General to Chief
Secretary, 21 July 1913, G.O. 700, Judicial, 21 Mar. 1914, IOL; and for similar gangs in
Coimbatore, MPAR, 1888: appx. C, xxi.
14. Agent, Vishakhapatnam, to Chief Secretary, 29 June 1900, and Special Agent to Agent, 30
May 1900, G.O. 1173, Judicial, 22 Aug. 1900, IOL.
15. Police Superintendent, Malabar, to Inspector-General, 25 Nov. 1876, MJP, 13, 4 Jan. 1877,
IOL.
16. Police Superintendent, Malabar, to Inspector-General, 28 Jan. 1898, G.O. 819, Judicial, 25
May 1898, IOL.
17. Police Superintendent, Anantapur, to Inspector-General, 31 Jan. 1923, G.O. 241, Judicial
(Police), 21 May 1923, IOL.
18. Robinson to Chief Secretary, 10 Nov. 1863, MJP, 60, 8 Dec. 1863, IOL.
19. Police Superintendent, Salem, to Inspector-General, 14 Oct. 1924, G.O. 646, Judicial
(Police), 10 Dec. 1924, IOL.
20. Report of A.J. Happell, 21 Apr. 1923, G.O. 572, Public, 23 July 1923, IOL.
21. Deputy Inspector-General, Central Range, to Inspector-General, 30 Oct. 1924, G.O. 147,
Judicial, 26 Mar. 1925, IOL.
22. Police Superintendent, Chittoor, to District Magistrate, 25 Jan. 1924, G.O. 227, Judicial
(Police), 21 Apr. 1924, IOL.
23. There are dangers in generalising about an institution which varied greatly from one part of
the province to another. In Thanjavur and the west coast districts there were no talaiyaris as
such, and in some parts the distinction between kudikavalgars and talaiyaris was slight. For
useful accounts of the traditional police, see Mahalingam, 1940:130-3 and Thomas Munro,
'Report on the Police of the Ceded Districts', 10 Apr. 1806, Miscellaneous Records, 24,
TNA.
24. District Magistrate, Bellary, to Chief Secretary, 2 Dec. 1822, Miscellaneous Records, 17,
TNA; Pate, 1917: 333-7.
25. Cited in Robinson to Chief Secretary, 24 Feb. 1861, MJP, 9, 4 Apr. 1861, IOL.
26. Hearn to Chief Secretary, 23 June 1870, MJP, 97, 19 Dec. 1870, IOL.
27. T.M. Horsfall to Chief Secretary, 8 Oct. 1895, G.O. 473, Judicial, 31 Mar. 1897, IOL. Pillai
is a Vellala caste name.
28. Police Superintendent, Madurai, to District Magistrate, 10 Oct. 1914, G.O. 2233, Judicial,
16 Sept. 1915, TNA. For the Piramalai Kallars, see Dumont, 19S7.
29. Horsfall to Chief Secretary, 8 Oct. 1895, G.O. 473, Judicial, 31 Mar. 1897, IOL.
30. G.O. 1278, Public Works and Labour, 10 May 1928, IOL.
31. E.g., the Judicial Member of the Executive Council, 29 Aug. 1908: 'as long as we retain on
our side the numerous petty Maravar zamindars in Tinnevelly, I don't think that Maravars
will give us trouble by sedition . . .' Notes to G.O. 1254, Judicial (Confidential), 10 Sept.
1908, TNA.
32. R.D. Broadfoot to Chief Secretary, 19 Sept. 1895, G.O. 473, Judicial, 31 Mar. 1897, IOL.
33. District Judge, Madurai, to Chief Secretary, 9 Nov. 1895, G.O. 473, Judicial, 31 Mar. 1897,
IOL.
34. District Judge, Tirunelveli, to Chief Secretary, 23 Sept. 1895, G.O. 473, Judicial, 31 Mar.
1897, IOL. Cf. Hatch, 1928: 165-80 for the prestige of Kuravar kavalgars.
35. For details of the Shanar-Maravar rivalry, see Hardgrave, 1969. The peak of dacoity around
1900, shown on the graph, reflects the high incidence of Maravar crime following the attack
on Sivakasi.
36. E.T.H. Stevenson to Inspector-General, 8 Apr. 1920, G.O. 1315, Home (Judicial)
(Confidential), 26 May 1920, IOL.
37. Head Assistant Agent, Narasapatnam, to Agent, Vishakhapatnam, 30 May 1901, G.O. 1928,
Judicial, 27 Dec. 1900, IOL.
38. Agent, Vishakhapatnam, to Chief Secretary, 22 July and 29 Sept. 1886, G.0.2601, Judicial,
29 Sept. 1886, IOL.
39. Deputy Inspector-General, Northern Range, to Inspector-General, 2 July 1886, G.O. 2601,
Judicial, 29 Sept. 1886.
40. Police Superintendent, Vishakhapatnam, report, 3 July 1886; Agent to Chief Secretary, 7
Aug. 1886; Deputy Inspector-General to Inspector-General, 2 July 1886: G.O. 2601,
Judicial, 29 Sept. 1886, IOL.
41. Reproduced in Deputy Inspector-General to Inspector-General, 22 Aug. 1886, G.O. 2601,
Judicial, 29 Sept. 1886.
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Raychaudhuri, T . , 1969, 'Permanent Settlement in Operation: Bakarganj District, East Bengal',
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Richards, J.F., 1975, Mughal Administration in Golconda, Oxford: Clarendon.
Sarada Raju, A., 1941, Economic Conditions in the Madras Presidency, 1800-1850, Madras:
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Winfred, D.J., 1914, Glimpses of Police Work in Tinnevelly, Madras: Addison.

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This article was downloaded by: [Monash University Library]

On: 27 September 2014, At: 07:23

The Journal of Peasant

Dacoity and rural crime in

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066157908438071

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

spontaneous looting to banditry as the experimental stage of incipient revolt.

In an intriguing passage written in the mid-1940s, Furnivall [1948: 137-41]

* School of Oriental and African Studies, London

Hindu southern Asia, where social banditry is inhibited by the tendency of

of rebellious poligars in Madurai and Tirunelveli, administrators of the English

GRAPH 1: DACOITY IN MADRAS PRESIDENCY, 1863-1939

[Source: MPARs 1864-1939]

Amateurs and Professionals

1937, not a particularly unfavourable year, twenty-four fishermen, forming

The Koravers or Kurchas, on whose propensities Colonel Hervey has

Australasia, British and high-caste Hindu police officers displayed a contempt

swept away. In consequence, talaiyaris deserted their hereditary calling, or,

Pariah attackers to obtain their conviction in court [MPAR, 1883:120; Winfred,

Bandits and Rebels

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