Fragmented Sovereignty, Dakaiti- (Banditry), and 'Criminal Tribe' in a 'Minor' State of Late Colonial India

Abstract

Scholars have often considered twentieth-century sovereignty in colonial contexts as increasingly connected to the modern, territorially bounded state, stimulated by the influence of European rule. Yet there remained more malleable and amorphous sovereign configurations well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of Indore, a 'minor' state in late colonial central India, this article reveals the ongoing dynamism of dakait ('bandits') within such configurations. By approaching the state as a disaggregated entity, it captures how such communities held complex reciprocal relationships with local state representatives. These interactions challenge older histories, both in South Asia and beyond, that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, rather than reflecting an interlocking web of relational and gradated jurisdictions. By exploring connections between dakait and the state at the 'everyday' level, this article also takes issue with existing emphases on the wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as 'criminal tribes'. Such connections could engender local responses that undercut their ethnographic categorization and complicate postcolonial critiques of the essentialization of caste and 'tribe' in South Asia. Reconceptualizing sovereignty ultimately provides us with a compelling analytic tool to reconsider wider scholarly axioms relating to colonial knowledge, marginality, and state-society relations.