Denotified or ex-criminal tribes, also termed vimukt jati, comprise people outlawed by the British under Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 and subsequent legislation. Free India denotified their criminal status. However, they remain suspect under Habitual Offenders Act, 1952. Legislation that targets folk practices and faith-healing, miracles and divination, and laws that ban use of living creatures for display and sport; and penalise beggars, vagrants, street performers, folk artistes and others existing on the peripheries are deployed to push these people further to the edge. Owing to their itinerant lifestyle and marginalised existence, they are not usually factored into electoral calculations. While many, as nomads and semi-nomads, elude decennial census surveys, their population, estimated at 110 million on the high side, could fill up three mid-size European countries.

Such communities encompass varied segments. These include sadhus, fakirs, pilgrims, jogis, miracle-workers, diviners, bards, sorcerers, eunuchs, snake-charmers, madari, qalandar, forest dwellers, poachers, hereditary criminals, dacoits, baaghi, sex workers, baiji, singers, musicians, panders, impersonators, conjurors, puppeteers, jugglers, acrobats and others who defy caste-based classification and the underlying rationale. Love for freedom and non-conformity, in some cases breaching decorum and ethics, characterise them. Colonial administrators penalised them as they could not be reined in like sedentary groups, and so, posed the greatest threat to the British Raj. Indeed, such disparate people as wandering mendicants and tawaifs, dancers cum courtesans, incited rebellions against the colonial rulers.

Alongside are those people who, while being sedentary, are distinctive for reasons that are peculiar to them. Together they exemplify diverse facets of folk ethos but are also part of the main'.