ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the colonial legislations that sought to sedentarize the itinerant and criminalize vagrancy, leading to the 1943 Bengal Vagrancy Act that flagposts a watershed moment in history. Drawing on the Western ideas of positivist criminology, the preceding acts considered the itinerants culpable of criminality; in some cases, to be genetically disposed to committing crimes. However, the 1943 Act, deployed immediately after the 1943 Bengal Famine, would deem vagrancy-in-itself a crime, and thus be used as a catch-all, where the rounding up of ‘vagrants’ was, in effect, geared toward ‘sanitizing’ against the massive refugee influx from rural Bengal.
