This introduction outlines some of the key historiographical debates concerning caste, ‘tribe’ and criminality, and their relationship to the modern state, in South Asia. Although these social categories have long, complex and often inter-related histories rooted in indigenous and precolonial ideas and institutions, they emerged most forcefully as categories of governance in the legal-political system of the colonial and postcolonial states. These categories remained highly unstable, however. There was a clear disjuncture between forms of ‘colonial’ knowledge which structured legal categorization and everyday negotiations and contestations of the same. Using the example of India’s so-called ‘criminal tribes’ - the 200 or so communities declared as criminals ‘by birth’ under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) during the colonial regime - we consider broader debates over the governing of ‘colonial’ categories, and subaltern agency and resistance in their making, as a way of interrogating the complex relationship between the ‘margins’ and the state.

引言概述了有关南亚种姓，“部落”和犯罪及其与现代国家的关系的一些主要史学辩论。尽管这些社会类别具有悠久，复杂且经常相互联系的历史，这些历史源于土著和前殖民思想和制度，但它们在殖民地和后殖民国家的法律政治体系中作为治理类别的出现最为有力。但是，这些类别仍然非常不稳定。在构成法律分类的“殖民”知识形式与每天的谈判和辩论之间存在明显的脱节。