Moon Gazer continues……

Our study showed that this tribe of traditional hunters was at some stage used by Chhatrapati Shivaji as guerrillas to harass the Mughal armies. The Maratha chief utilized their intimate knowledge of the topography of the Deccan Plateau and their hunting skills to his advantage. It appears that once the wars between the Marathas and the Mughals slowly abated, the tribesmen were left to fend for themselves. But the instinct to kill, which they had acquired while fighting the Mughals, continued to haunt them and was possibly what led them to commit such crimes.

 When British rule ended in 1947, the Government of India, in an effort to integrate the tribe into mainstream society, allotted twenty-five bighas of land to each family. However, by then, they had taken to crime habitually— mainly burglaries and robberies. They gave away  the  land allotted to them on ‘batai’ (share-cropping) basis to traditional farmers.

 ‘That the criminal belonging to this community is addicted to crime is undeniable—he does not labour, he cannot and would not stop, his hands are as soft as any clerk’s and prove he does no manual labour in the fields which he sometimes might profess to do,’ observed a British police officer who had dealt with these criminals.

 Some of the gang members have amassed considerable wealth from crime and have acquired huge landholdings as large as 250 bighas, with tube wells and tractors. Despite their prosperity, they travel to far-off places, dressed shabbily, to commit crimes. They stay on railway station platforms, footpaths or parks in squalid conditions. However, when they return home, they wear good clothes and ornaments, watch films and consume meat and alcohol regularly. The villages inhabited by these gangs are laid out in a manner that makes it difficult for the police to raid them. Usually, houses are built at an elevation, surrounded by jungles, canals, rivers or rocky outcrops. While doing research in the Guna district, SI Narinder Chawla discovered that an observation post (‘machaan’) is a common feature of these villages.

To be continued…….