Notified tribes of India

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Notified tribes are the tribes that were originally listed under the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, as "addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences." Once a tribe became "notified" as criminal, all its members were required to register with the local magistrate, failing which they would be charged with a crime under the Indian Penal Code. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1952 repealed the notification, i.e. ‘de-notified’.

The creation of these categories should be seen in the context of colonialism. It is true that the British listed these tribes separately by creating a category of criminal castes or tribes, but they existed before Britain conquered India.

The name "Criminal Tribes" is itself a misnomer as no definition of tribe denotes occupation, but they were identified as tribes being their primary occupation. The first Census was in 1871 and at that time there was no consensus nor any definition of "Tribe." The terms "Tribe" and "Caste" were used interchangeably for these communities. In this colonial context, the term "Tribe" connoted the notions of primitiveness and backwardness and hence the assumption that these tribes needed to be civilized or transformed.

This article is a stub and should be integrated with denotified, from which it was shamelessly copied. Both "notified" and "denotified" should be replaced by an article about the Criminal Tribes Act.

The UN’s anti-discrimination body (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD))asked India to repeal the Habitual Offenders Act and affectively rehabilitate the denotified and nomadic tribes on March 9, 2007.