Provincial governments in India inherited their bureaucratic apparatus from the British colonial government. In addition to the police and the judiciary, it also retained some auxiliary institutions of local surveillance and statistics collection. While the police and the judiciary were accepted as prominent foundations of state operations, institutions like mukhiyagiri and chowkidari attracted criticism, and their relevance was debated in the United Provinces (UP). This chapter discusses an administrative tradition inherited from the colonial government and highlights the continuity of a familiar attitude in the UP administration when it came to governing the village. While the Prantiya Rakshak Dal (PRD) and the special powers to deal with ‘habitual offenders’ were primarily geared towards urban and rural contexts, issuing guns to ‘reliable villages’, mukhiyas and chowkidars were important for the colonial state to govern the countryside. Put together, they constituted the broader strategy of the postcolonial state to maintain public order. This chapter will take the discussion forward and focus on the institution of chowkidari and mukhiyagiri to show that in the face of political volatility that posed a constant challenge to postcolonial authority, the post- 1947 UP government, owing to the sovereign anxiety that acted to mark its territory, could not avoid the seductions of the colonial art of governance. It resorted to rebranding old institutions in the face of ‘changed times’, where the Congress had to actively function as an independent government rather than just a mass-mobilising front opposing colonial power.

The recruitment of village chowkidars was connected to the larger politics of colonial recruitment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1880s, suggestions for employing unemployed and reformed ex-criminals were made. They were expected to serve as effective informers on their fellow members of criminal tribes. Many such ‘reformed’ members of the criminal tribes were employed for surveillance and monitoring of various criminal tribe settlements. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Sanauriahs of the Lalitpur criminal tribe settlement worked as the village, municipal and railway chowkidar. About four hundred such chowkidars were guarding Beriahs, Haburahs and Natts in the Etah region. They were employed to monitor and control the annual gatherings of wandering groups in the 1880s.