Friday 18 November 2022 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Seminar Rooms B3 & B4, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge
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The Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice, are delighted to present:
"The narrative of a criminal woman finds its bearings within the caste system in India. During British colonial rule, the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 classified several tribes as hereditary, habitual criminals who by nature were predisposed to committing petty offences. Their alleged likelihood to commit crime at any moment justified blanket surveillance against them at all times. The hereditary caste system was the primary sociological paradigm through which the colonial state understood and perceived criminality. It framed specific “deceitful” crimes as the ascribed occupations of communities that were outside the order of the caste system and pursued impure, unspecific or non-traditional occupations, sometimes without residing in permanent shelters. This talk explores the gendered nature of the colonial construction of criminality attributed to women belonging to Vimukta jatis (denotified nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes) through an analysis of criminal law. The first section of this talk outlines the influence of caste in the construction of women’s criminality through the CTA. The second section locates Adivasi and Vimukta women’s bodies as sites of casteist state repression through criminal law and the criminal justice system, even as custodial violence against Vimukta women by the state has been erased and made invisible. The structural underpinning of this violence is negated in “mainstream” discourse. The third section details how narratives of criminality further aid and abet repression, by analysing arrest data for excise offences in Madhya Pradesh and bail orders passed against women from the Vimukta Kuchbandhiya community in MP."
With Speaker Nikita Sonavane,
Nikita Sonavane has worked as a legal researcher and an advocate for five years. She is the
co-founder of the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project (CPAProject) a Bhopal
based litigation and research intervention focused on building accountability against
criminalisation of oppressed caste communities by the Police and the criminal justice system.
Nikita has previously worked on issues of local governance, forest rights, and gender in
Gujarat. She graduated with a B.A. (Political Science) from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai,
LL.B. from Government Law College, Mumbai and an LL.M in Law and Development
degree from Azim Premji University (APU), Bangalore. She is a visiting research fellow at
the University of Oxford working on anti-discrimination law in India. Her writings have
been at the intersection of policing, caste and digitisation of the criminal justice system in
India and have been published by the AI Now Institute at NYU, Indian Express, the Hindu,
Caravan among others.