ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an examination of the Act's impact upon the Minas, that tribe who, as J. F Stephen observed, 'were chiefly in the mind of the framers of the Bill when it was introduced'. The chapter considers the important role of the criminal tribe's policy in first distilling extant modes of thinking about categorising native character and behaviour, and then expanding and developing these modes into a distinctive and quite new modality of knowledge in a kind of nascent colonial criminology. In concluding the chapter Vivian advised the district officer or policeman that groups of Bawarias on criminal expeditions had also been found to communicate through marks and signs left upon roads and upon the walls of their camping places. The Punjab government's initial reluctance to move forward with registration of the Minas was due to a large portion of the tribe living along its border with the native states of Rajputana.
