The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 empowered the government to declare a whole community criminal by birth. Members had to register, report, and could be restricted in movement and confined to settlements.
In Punjab the communities listed included the Sansi, Bawaria, Bazigar, Gandhila, Nat, Minas and others, and in some districts substantial populations were covered.
The reasoning was explicitly hereditary. The Act's framers believed occupation and criminality were inherited by caste, which was an idea the colonial ethnographies of Punjab had helped construct.
It was repealed in 1952 and the communities were designated Denotified Tribes. The Habitual Offenders legislation that replaced it has been criticised as reproducing the same effect.
Seventy years later those communities remain among the poorest in Punjab, are still treated with suspicion by police, and still struggle to obtain the documents that everything else depends on.
An administrative category invented in 1871 is still visible in a Punjab village in 2026, at the settlement on the edge that the village's own account of itself leaves out.
The Land Alienation Act of 1900 divided the province's communities into agricultural tribes and the rest, and the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 designated a further set as criminal by birth.
Both were administrative categories that hardened into social facts. A community listed as agricultural could hold land and one listed as criminal had to report to a police station.
The schedules survived the laws. What communities can and cannot do in Punjab today still tracks the lists made for revenue and policing a century and a half ago.