Bazigars, Sansis, Nats, Gadhilas, Bauria, Gandhila and other communities lived by performance, hunting, metalwork, rope-work and seasonal labour, moving between villages, camping at the edge.
Most were designated criminal tribes under the 1871 Act. Registration, surveillance and restriction of movement were applied to entire populations by birth for eighty years.
After the repeal in 1952 they became Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, and in Punjab most are now settled on the outskirts of villages, on encroached or allotted land, with poor access to schooling and documents.
The bazigar acrobatic tradition, the nat rope-walking, and the performance repertoires of these communities are among the oldest continuous performing traditions in Punjab and are almost entirely unrecorded.
A Punjabi village's account of itself generally does not include the settlement at its edge, and that omission is the most consistent feature of Punjab's written record of itself.
The logic of the Act was that criminality was hereditary and could be attached to a community by name. A child born into a notified tribe was registered at birth and the register followed them for life. Nothing had to be proved against any individual for any of it to apply to them.
Documents are the standing problem. A settlement without an address gets no ration card, no entry on a voter roll and no school admission, and each of those is needed to obtain the next. Families that have lived at the edge of the same village for seventy years are often unable to prove that they live anywhere.
The performance traditions were the livelihood and they went when the demand went. What replaced them is casual labour, scrap collection and seasonal migration.