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Interrupted Sovereignties in the North-East Frontier of British India, 1787–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2019

REEJU RAY
REEJU RAY*
Affiliation:
York University, Canada Email: reeju.ray@gmail.com
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Abstract

The Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills in the North East Frontier of British India were subject to shifting and differentiated forms of colonial governance. Defying notions of coexistence with or autonomy from colonial rule, the colonial history of this region was bound up with specific spatio-temporal constructions. By examining the nature of jurisdictional and political encounters in the Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills, this article addresses the interruptions to imperial sovereignty in the Frontier. Imperial sovereignty moved in juridical forms, affecting and being affected by classificatory challenges such as hills and plains, hill tribal, and settler. The relationship between jurisdictional boundaries, plural authority, and imperial sovereignty appears in judicial and revenue files of different levels of the English East India Company government and the British government. Recurrent boundary disputes between the spatio-temporal units of hills and plains during the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries point towards contingent strategies of governance. The unfolding of these disputes over the course of the nineteenth century also show that law and jurisdiction as carriers of imperial sovereignty were spatially and temporally uneven. The historical processes highlighted in this article concern the sub-region of Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills and parts of the Sylhet district of British Bengal, which, at present, constitute the Indian state of Meghalaya and parts of northern Bangladesh, respectively.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 606 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 See Figure 1, J. G. Bartholomew, Eastern Bengal and Assam with Bhutan, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. 11, new edition, published under the authority of His Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907–09, National Archives of India.

2 See Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

3 Transformation of this dynamic borderland region into a colonial frontier has been the subject of much recent scholarship on the North East Frontier of the British empire in India. See Chatterjee, Indrani, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cederlof, Gunnel, Founding and Empire in India's North-Eastern Frontiers 1790–1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mishra, Sanghamitra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial North East India (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Vumlallian Zou, David and Satish Kumar, M., ‘Mapping a Colonial Borderland: Objectifying the Geo-Body of India's North East’, The Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 1 (February 2011)Google Scholar; Sharma, Jayeeta, Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kar, Bodhisattva, ‘Can the Postcolonial Begin? Deprovincializing Assam’, in Dube, Saurabh (ed.), Handbook of Modernity in South Asia: Modern Makeovers (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 43–58Google Scholar; ‘When Was the Postcolonial? A History of Policing Impossible Lines’, in Baruah, Sanjib (ed.) Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 49–79Google Scholar.

4 Decrees, regulations, treaties, and agreements produced the hills as legally differentiated spaces. Prominent among them is the Bengal Regulation XII of 1833 that legalized the existence of exceptional administrative and legal zones in which the laws or regulations of the presidencies would not apply. Frontier hills were variously named non-regulation territories, scheduled districts, backward, or really backward tracts.

5 Prominent among the scholarship that rescues histories from the bounds of the nation state are the following, in addition to the works mentioned above. van Schendel, William, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South Asia (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed; Kar, ‘When Was the Postcolonial?’, pp. 49–79.

6 Benjamin Hopkins shows the different kinds of sovereign authority that manifested in the North West Frontier of the British empire. The difference in sovereign authority and governance of the Frontier was not of a different degree, but a different kind. See Hopkins, Benjamin, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality’, The Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 2 (2015): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Here I am referring to both historical and contemporary instances of political and social mobilization that rely on colonial spatio-temporal constructions of primitive, tribal, backward, scheduled, and so on.

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15 These larger concerns find resonance with Mandy Sadan's work on Kachin communities. She challenges dominant ethnological and anthropological approaches to the ‘tribal’. She presents a history of Kachin communities fractured between the Burmese, Indian, and Chinese borderlands, and examines the production of contemporary ethno-nationalist social ideologies. See Sadan, Mandy, Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Stoler points this out succinctly when she writes ‘imperial states and their administrative apparatus never achieved command over the shifting terrain of categories they helped to create or over quixotic shifts in who “belonged”’. Stoler's reference to Sommer, Doris, Proceed with Caution, when Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 132.

17 See Cederlof, Founding; Ludden, David, ‘The First Boundary of Bangladesh on Sylhet's Northern Frontiers’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 48, no. 1 (June 2003): 9Google Scholar. Also see Ludden, David, ‘Investing in Nature around Sylhet: An Excursion into Geographical History’, in Rangarajan, Mahesh and Sivaramakrishnan, K. (eds.), India's Environmental History, Vol. 2 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), pp. 64–94Google Scholar.

18 Cederlof shows that there was an expansion of direct revenue collections and therefore the expansion of cultivable agricultural land, or levies or rights on natural resources including forest, mineral, and animals, as well as tribute from local authorities in lieu of military protection.

19 Board of Revenue Papers, 29 December 1787, No. 10, AS, emphasis added.

20 Board of Revenue Papers, 29 December 1789, No. 8, ASA.

21 See Ludden, ‘Investing’; also see Mishra, Sanghamitra, ‘The Nature of Colonial Intervention in the Naga Hills 1840–1880’, Economic and Political Weekly 51 (19–25 December 1998): 3273–3279Google Scholar.

22 Board of Revenue Papers, 29 December 1787, No. 10, ASA. Interestingly, in colonial records over the following decades, the Bengali–Khasi ‘mixed-race’ communities no longer appear, neither are they found in colonial histories of the region, nor in anthropological accounts of Khasis. The existence of such communities threatened the neat categories upon which colonial governance was predicated. The manner in which such complexities were sought to be resolved is examined in the latter half of the article.

23 Gunnel Cederlof also argues that racial distinctions were not relevant to Company boundary-making initiatives. Such civilizational hierarchies were characteristic of a later period of colonial rule, as Nick Dirks pointed out in his conceptualization of the ‘ethnographic state’. She argues that, in the early nineteenth century, commercial interests preceded all other interests, and races were understood as groups and communities. See Cederlof, Gunnel, ‘Fixed Boundaries, Fluid Landscapes: British Expansion into the North East Bengal in the 1820s’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46, no. 4 (2009): 518–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Dirks, Nick, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 125–228Google Scholar.

24 Board of Revenue papers 1782 File No. 8 Serial No. 3; 1783 File No. 12 Serial No. 2; 1787 File No. 13, ASA.

25 Board of Revenue Papers, 27 November 1787, No. 33, ASA.

26 Board of Revenue Papers, 9 November 1787, No. 13, ASA.

27 Jangkhomang Guite shows that raids were mechanisms for procuring labour in the case of Kuki and Chin Hills, and also demonstrate significant transformations in the political economy of these hills and the emergence of new forms of authority relations. See Guite, Jangkhomang, ‘Civilization and Its Malcontents: The Politics of Kuki Raids in the Nineteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 48, no. 3 (July/September 2011): 339–376CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Board of Revenue Papers, 27 November 1787, No. 36, ASA.

29 Board of Revenue Papers, January 1788, No. 4, ASA.

30 Board of Revenue Papers, April 1789, No. 8, ASA.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 The colonial construction of ‘tribe’ varied across the colony. Several scholars have examined the category ‘tribal’. For instance, James C. Scott argues that tribes were ‘barbarians by design’ and evaded imperial and civilizational forces as a political response. Tribes, he points out, were not genealogically or culturally homogeneous units, but created as such by the colonial state in order to exert control over them. See Scott, An Upland, p. 209; in directly administered and agricultural areas, tribes were idealized as aboriginals and sedentarized for agricultural labour and revenue. See Sivaramakrishnan, K., Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; also see Phillip, Kavita, Civilising Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in South Asia (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003)Google Scholar; Bannerjee, Prathama, The Politics of Time: Primitives and History-Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the image of the ‘noble savage’ was invoked in Ootacamund and other hilly areas where colonial stations were built and a resolution for creating European enclaves demanded such definitions. See Kenny, Judith, ‘Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 4 (1995): 694–714CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in the North West Frontier province, tribes were characterized as inherently aggressive, trained in warfare since childhood, fanatical, and brave. See Agha, Sameetah, ‘Inventing a Frontier: Imperial Motives and Sub-Imperialism on British India's North West Frontier, 1899–98’, in Agha, Sameetah and Kolsky, Elizabeth (eds.), Fringes of Empire: People, Places and Spaces in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 94–114Google Scholar; Radhika Singha has pointed out that the colonial state attempted to create an encompassing typology of tribal and incorporated diverse groups such as the Thugs, Pindaris, Bhils, and others. Such classification enabled distinguishing between the productive revenue-yielding subjects and the non-revenue-yielding subjects. More significantly, such classification enabled legalized coercive measures against certain groups, culminating in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. See Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

36 See Cederlof, ‘Fixed’, p. 518.

37 Ibid.; Cederlof, Founding.

38 Cederlof, ‘Fixed’; ibid.

39 See, for example, Wilcox, R., ‘Memoir of a Survey of Asam and the Neighbouring Countries, Executed in 1825-6-7-8’, Asiatic Researches, Vol. XVIII (Calcutta Bengal Military Printing Press 1832), pp. 314–469Google Scholar; Robinson, William, A Descriptive Account of Asam: With a Sketch of the Local Geography and a Concise History of the Tea Plant of Asam: to Which Is Added a Short Account of the Neighbouring Tribes, Exhibiting Their History (Delhi: Sansakaran Prakashak, 1975, 1841)Google Scholar; Walters, Henry, ‘A Journey across Pandua Hills, Near Silhet, in Bengal’, Asiatic Researches XVII (Calcutta: Bengal Military Press, 1832)Google Scholar; see also Thomas Fischer's surveys, among others.

40 I have examined this in detail in an unpublished article entitled ‘Frontiers of Law’, presented at the Institute of Global Law and Policy Workshop, Harvard Law School, July 2016.

41 Syiemlieh, David, British Administration in Meghalaya: Policy and Pattern (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1989)Google Scholar; see also Cederlof, Founding, pp. 60–61.

42 Aitchison, C. U., A Collection of Treaties Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, Vol. XII (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1931), pp. 118–119Google Scholar.

43 Examples of alleged kidnapping of British subjects from the Sylhet plains for the purpose of human sacrifice can be found in official correspondence and in officially produced historical accounts. See Pemberton, R. B., Report on the Eastern Frontier of India, 1835 (New Delhi: Mittal Publishers, 2008), pp. 210–221Google Scholar; see also Mackenzie, Alexander, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of North East Bengal (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1979, 1844), pp. 217–244Google Scholar.

44 Bodhisattva Kar has shown that headhunting tribes of the Frontier became targets of colonial efforts to find singular authority or headmen to represent the figure of the sovereign. The allegorical power of heads linked sovereignty and primitivity. See Kar, Bodhisattva, ‘Heads in the Naga Hills’, in Chatterjee, Partha, Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, and Kar, Bodhisattva (eds.), New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

45 For instance, after a part of the Jaintia lands known as the Seven Reaches or Shat Bank was annexed to Cachar, the commissioner of Sylhet wrote to the Sudder Board of Revenue insisting that the Shat Bank ‘naturally’ belonged to Sylhet. The correspondence indicated that there was a general opinion that, once Shat Bank was amalgamated into Sylhet and all the laws and regulations of settlement imposed upon it, the same could be extended to the rest of the Jaintia territory. The Government of Bengal sanctioned the former under Act XXI of 1836. From Secretary to the Government of India to the Revenue Department, Government of Bengal, BG Papers 1837, No. 353, ASA.

46 Foreign Political, 7 February 1835, No. 101, National Archives of India (NAI).

47 Cederlof shows that relations between the Khasi Chiefs and the Company were primarily dictated by the rich market of limestone trade until the 1820s. Several agreements were drawn with the Company to control the market and secure leases to the quarries in the hills. See Cederlof, Founding, pp. 164–168.

48 Syiemlieh, British Administration in Meghalaya, p. 48.

49 Sanad was the descriptive term for agreements signed between a centralized Mughal authority and titular rulers of the Mughal empire. The use of sanads instead of treaties signalled the changing position assumed by the English EIC in relation to Khasi Chiefs.

50 See Chatterjee, Forgotten.

51 Foreign Political, 11 February 1831, No. 26-32, NAI.

52 The power and authority of Shamans vis-à-vis the Chiefs, power attributed to landscape features like forests, rivers, and mountains, and spaces outside the physical realm all point towards creative means of eluding colonial incursions and cooption into colonial space-time. Further elaboration of this can be found in Reeju Ray, ‘Placing the Khasi Jaintia Hills: Sovereignty, Custom, and Narratives of Continuity’, unpublished dissertation, 2013.

53 Ibid.

54 Dorsett, ‘Sovereignty as Governance’.

55 Cederlof, ‘Fixed’.

56 For a substantiation of this premise with respect to Goalpara and its surrounds, see Mishra, Sanghamitra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial North East India (India and UK: Routledge, 2011), pp. 19–41Google Scholar.

57 Foreign Political, 11 February 1835, No. 90, NAI.

58 Board of Revenue Papers 48, File No. 8-100, ASA.

59 I was only able to get an earlier draft of the map that was not scaled, not the one that was published along with the report because it is one that shows present-day international borders.

60 Board of Revenue Papers 48, File No. 8-100, ASA.

61 Fischer's account does not provide a date or details of this grant, but he wrote that the grant was given; Board of Revenue Papers 48, File No. 8-100, ASA, emphasis added.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 See Cederlof, Founding, pp. 164–168.

66 Valverde, Mariana, Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 82–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Board of Revenue Papers 48, File No. 8/100, ASA.

68 Mackenzie, History, pp. 262–263.

69 Board of Revenue Papers 48, File No. 8/100, ASA.

70 Ibid.

71 Kar, ‘Heads’.

72 Board of Revenue Papers 48, File No. 8/100, ASA.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

76 Assam Commissioner's Papers, 1871–1873, File No. 635, ASA.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 Colonel Haughten, Deputy Commissioner quoted in ‘Memorandum on Khasia and Garo Boundary Carried Out by Colonel Bivar, Deputy Commissioner, Garo Hills, and Captain Woodthrope, R.E., Survey Officer, in March 1873’, Assam Commissioner's Papers, 1871–1873, File No. 635, ASA.

80 For a discussion of British translation of existing practices as blackmail, such as the posa tribute relationship between hill and plains inhabitants in the Brahmaputra valley, inflecting colonial border making, see Simpson, ‘Bordering’, p. 519.

81 Assam Commissioner's Papers, 1871–1873, File No. 635, ASA.

82 Lyngams were included in anthropologist P. R. T. Gurdon's monograph called The Khasis, thereby establishing that they were not Garos, but Khasis. See Gurdon, P. R. T., The Khasis (Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1987)Google Scholar.

83 Assam Commissioner's Papers, 1871–1873, File No. 635, ASA.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.

87 Resolution passed by the Political Department of the Government of Bengal, 24 October 1873, Assam Commissioner's Papers, 1871–1873, File No. 635, ASA.

88 Assam Commissioner's Papers, 1871–1873, File No. 635, GS.

89 Ibid.

90 Skaria, Ajay, ‘Shades of Wildness: Tribe, Caste, and Gender in Western India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3 (August 1997): 726–745CrossRefGoogle Scholar.