Southern Penal Spaces and the Social/ Political in Modern India

This chapter introduces the idea of southern penal spaces as a means of capturing distinctive features of penality and sociality in societies of the global south. Grounding our theory in the data of southern experience, we focus on India—home to almost one fifth of the world’s population—and the continuing penalisation here of historically marginalised castes and tribes. We focus upon communities classified as de-notified (ex-criminal) tribes and nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, groups whose membership partially overlaps, and who we abbreviate here for convenience as DNTs. These groups include an estimated 110 million people living in at least 1235 distinct communities (Government of India, Nomadic and Denotified Communities, 2023) existing on the very periphery of Indian society and social orders. While historically most were non-urban, their lives now span an arc from the centres of metropolitan cities like Mumbai (pop. 22 million) to remote forest tracts of rural India.