000			02046nam a22001457a 4500
999			_c514254 _d514254
008			201021b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aBajrange, Dakxinkumar, Gandee, Sarha and Gould, William. _919690
245			_aSetting the citizen, the nomad: 'Habitual offenders', rebellion, and civic consciousness in western India 1938-1952
260			_aModern Asian Studies
300			_a54(2), Mar, 2020: p.337-383
520			_aThis article explores the politics of civic engagement during India's long decolonization between 1938 and 1952 for communities—the erstwhile ‘criminal tribes’—whose lifestyles were complicated by controls on their movement before and shortly following India's independence. It argues that their varied and contingent strategies of mobilization increasingly identified community particularities—notably, their marking as ‘criminals’ and a history of movement—as a basis for negotiating their problematic inclusion within the evolving citizenship frameworks of the late colonial, then post-colonial, state. These early forms of civic consciousness set the parameters for later strategies that sought to mobilize communities by engaging with ‘universal’, ‘differentiated’, and indigenized conceptions of civic responsibility and rights. The most surprising finding of this research is that these strategies (via anti-colonialism) often embraced and celebrated forms of illegality and criminality. The romanticism of the dacoit (bandit)-cum-freedom fighter charged Dhaku Sultan-like figures with political heroism. In the context of independence and the founding of the Constitution, strategies turned to the (un)realized promises of freedom and citizenship rights. The final part of the article turns to the implications of ‘denotification’ for the so-called criminal tribes in the early 1950s, which provided both obstacles and avenues to strategies of mobilization after independence.- Reproduced
773			_aModern Asian Studies
906			_aTribes - India
942			_cAR