Abstract
This book is a refreshing reminder of the often forgotten significance of monastic institutions in the construction of the political and economic geography of the Himalayan region and the surrounding plains. Chatterjee presents several interwoven narratives of early modern India to explain how these ‘pasts were forgotten’ in modern historiography. According to Chatterjee, it was with the colonial invasion that these narratives disappeared from public consciousness. Her project can, therefore, be seen as an important contribution to the reconstruction and remembrance of forgotten pasts.
A discourse on ‘forgetting’ of these pasts is quite revealing in itself. It tells us much about the ideological structure of the Raj and its inherent desire to impose a hegemonic morality in order to establish an exploitative economy based on agricultural cultivation. Chatterjee’s work makes a rich contribution to this discourse by bringing into prominence three aspects. First, she draws attention to the texture of monastic communities and how they came to play an important role in the establishment of shared cosmographies within the order and the plains, creating a monastic geographicity. Second, she tells the story of how these subjects were deemed ‘savage’ and unimportant by the Company State with its imperial demand for territory. She contends that herein emerges the act of ‘forgetting’. This also became essential to overriding the existing gender code of the monasteries and the geographicity it created, which gave much agency to women who were amongst the patrons of some monastic orders and were also involved in the pastoral care, services and cultivation of the monastic lands. Third, she scrutinises the effect of the tradition of forgetting in postcolonial histories, which, she argues, was lamentably unable to recognise the monastic subjects and their role in the larger political economy. She elaborates that such ‘State amnesia’ was unfortunately carried on by postcolonial scholars including feminist historians and was also evident in subsequent writings on ‘tribes’, which in overlooking the importance of monastic subjects and especially the role of women, sustained ‘the devaluation of particular relationships initiated by colonial economies’ (p. 359).
An important contribution of this work is its insistence on a re-envisioning of the monastic order: from simple ascetic abodes to instead principal centres of administrative, military, economic and pastoral functions. Here, monastic signifies not only the architectural unit in which monks belonging to different traditions inhabited physical spaces, but is much rather understood as an entire lifestyle which holistically structures the everydayness of the monastic subjects. Chatterjee also draws attention to the important role of dakshina or donations in the creation of such monastic governments. The monastic residences soon came to become important centres for trade, pilgrimage and local markets, which bound together different monastic assemblages. This monastic geographicity bestowed a commonality of life-ways, thus creating a shared cosmography amongst the spread-out monastic residences.
Chatterjee’s work supports the view that the institution of marriage ought to be understood in its complexity, not merely as a set of performative religious rituals and ceremonies but also in its capacity as a component and medium for political and economic dialogue across geographical spaces. She establishes with rigour that marriage was the most important form of monastic diplomacy as marriages were arranged between clans ‘loyal to a common teacher and spiritual-ritual lineage’ (p. 56). This was a relation that proved useful in the alignment during military combat. To ensure that these ties were not dissolved with the death of the man involved in a conjugal bond, plural forms of marriages existed, such as levirate marriages in different variations as well as marriages between half-brothers and half-sisters. This is not to say that women were regarded as mere objects in an economic transaction, but in many cases, women held monastic estates, gave patronage to monastic institutions in the form of donation, held authority and cultivated their own land. However, these realities were ignored by the British who, in order to expand their territorial control, had very little interest to continue the tradition of widow inheritance and further banned levirate marriages as incestuous. The Company State declared the agricultural cultivation by women as a savage practice, while simultaneously utilising their civilising mission as an alibi to expand their economic control. As the Company was unable to comprehend the legal and political complexities of the native population, they categorised them as ‘tribals’, ‘savages’ and subjects that had to be civilised. Native attempts made by the Ahom-Bengali literati to decipher the societal structure of monastic orders were then systematically excluded, as they could not be accommodated within the colonial narrative. Through the establishment of a new administrative order, they found willing helpers to legitimise the narrative of a discovery of a ‘backward’ and ‘savage’ society.
What is most disconcerting to Chatterjee, however, is that postcolonial historians have carried forward this colonial legacy and ignored the multiple narratives that surrounded the monastic pasts. She also points out that anthropologists studying the Northeast viewed marriage as a simple apolitical institution and have thus completely neglected the pivotal role of marriage in dictating the political and economic order. Chatterjee states that the ‘Ontologies of “tribal” being, “backward” livelihoods and cultures, once created by imperial fiat, now become foundational to a postcolonial scholarly consensus, especially in the historiography of Assam’ (p. 359).
Chatterjee’s book provides a rich and valuable contribution, especially to a still understudied region of Northeast India, and her work will be beneficial to scholars focusing on religion, marriage and postcolonial histories.