Protectors and predators: 19th-century Indigenous Bhil policing in Company India

Official and academic discourse about Indigenous Peoples’ engagement with colonial legal orders has frequently cast them either as criminals or rebels. Challenging these tropes, this chapter studies the engagement of Indigenous Bhil communities in western India by examining their role as police in the 19th century under the English East India Company (‘Company’). Bhil policing demonstrates that crime and rebellion were only strands in a richer tapestry of engagement with colonial authority. Scholarship is sparse but generally uncritical of colonial ideas of on Bhil policing’s ‘civilising’ and ‘ordering’ functions. This neither leaves room for recognising Bhil agency nor engages with scholarship about imperial policing. Examining unpublished archival material and published sources reveals that Bhils were not only targets but also enforcers and mediators of colonial normative ordering. Their engagement ranged from reliance on pre-Company practises and regional power dynamics to drawing from co-optive policing strategies employed elsewhere across empire. While sometimes furthering the Company’s iteration of order, Bhil policing frequently subverted it. Despite Company attempts to rigidly define policing roles and societal structures, Bhil policing’s strength were its fluidity and imbrication within regional familial, social and economic networks. However, the position of Bhil police was tenuous. Within a narrow timeframe, a Bhil policeman could oscillate between a protector to being a predator, making them susceptible to the wrath of both the Company and fellow Bhils. This chapter thus questions linear colonial narratives around policing by examining how colonised peoples navigated and engaged with policing and more generally colonial criminal law.