Abstract
Reviewing the same book twice (earlier done in The Book Review) provides an immensely profitable exercise of re-reading a text. Re-reading produces different comprehension or strengthens the understanding. Reviewing Sanghamitra Misra’s above-mentioned wdork provides this rare opportunity of re-reading. Most books on the north-east deal with its ongoing epistemological struggle with identity and space. Sanghamitra’s book too deals with the same changing spectre of identity with its changing political space of a very low profile district of Assam, Goalpara. The author picked up this sleepy ‘borderland’ and penetrated its apparently calm exterior to bring out the deep churning this nondescript place has actually undergone in last two to three centuries. Goalpara despite being just a small district of Assam province had historical linkages with Tibet, Bhutan, Bengal, Coochbehar, Bengal and finally Assam. From, to use the author’s words, ‘an anomalous Mughal frontier into a distinct local space….[to a] fragmental zone of dependent and independent polities and bounded political units of the colonial state…[to a] colonial borderland…reduce[ing] it to a marginal realm of colonial cores’.
Indeed, Goalapara was an unusual space. Surrounded by the states of Tibet and Bhutan, two expanding states like the Ahoms and Mughals on two sides of the neighbourhood, inhabited by myriad tribal autochthones, a strong sedentarised peasantry, innumerable chieftaindoms, the massive landscape of dense forests and equally dense wildlife all converged to make a critical zone. The author was able to capture this diversity vividly and the problem it presented either for agrarianisation or for polity formation. However, along with other areas of the region, Goalpara evolved an autonomous polity under the Koches. Ecology, autochthones and peasant groups were interestingly integrated to the political economy of state making by the Koches in a troubled frontier region. The Koches however did not survive the expansionist designs of the Mughal imperia. A series of expeditions yielded the defeat of partial absorption of Kochbihar, Goalpara and Duars into the Mughal Empire which made it part of the political economic processes of the Mughal Empire. The agrarianisation also resulted in peasant discontent and consequent resistance movement reflecting an amazing fluidity of history in this limited space. The colonial intervention in the nineteenth century did not however halt the rapid fluidity. The colonial endeavour in expanding the agrarian order in this depopulated and uninhabited territory created new communities of landholders and new authorities of power. To compound it there were overlapping territorialities and shared sovereignties resulting in multiple contestations. Trade formed an important feature of the economy in a frontier region. Goalpara was no exception. Under colonialism this trading activity underwent significant reorientation to affect its history. The colonial state then settled down to appropriate the acquired territory by sponsoring migratory waves to settle and the wasteland consequencing changes in the region’s landholding structures and property rights supervised by a set of new colonial laws that substantially affected the state society continuum and were successful in creating a hierarchy of contesting claims of political identity. One such claim was the controversy over speech, language and identity. The space of Goalpara was claimed to be an integral part of the cultural landscape of Bengal and Assam at the same time. In this politics of identity the elite of Goalapara was the critical player. This chapter was brilliantly brought to life by the author. There were contradictory claims and counter-claims. There were landed interest and cultural affiliations crisscrossing. In the midst of such contesting expansionisms the indigenous culture of Goalpara was at an existentialist crossroad. ‘We have never been either Assamese or Bengali. They are both our neighbours. We are neither of the two… we are we. We are the people of this area. We are Goalparia…we are the people of this customs and traditions’ reflected another assertion to complicate this politics of identity. How these contestations over the politics of identity generated new narratives of history in Goalpara, how standardised histories were resisted through such narratives, how memories of the local past had become the new resort and how despite surrendering to a constructed national history of Assam/India, the Goalparia identity still remains secluded in and about its landscape, about its tall trees and forests, about its wildlife iconised by the elephant and its catchers immortalised in the Mahout bandhu songs. All these are very poignantly brought about in the last chapter entitled ‘Histories, Memories and Identities’ by the author.
The book begins roughly in the later Mughal period, spans to the advent of the colonials and ends with the recasting of Goalpara as a borderland after 200 years of colonial rule. It touches upon the entire gamut of historical processes like pre-colonial polity formation in the region, absorptive intervention by the mighty Mughal state and the concomitant transformation in its polity and economy and the eventual advent of British colonials who wrested it back from Bengal and attached it to Assam in 1874, interestingly to make Assam a viable state. The book then concentrated on the colonial transformation that Goalpara underwent under the British and the kind of politics it generated to relegate it into an insignificant borderland. The success of the author was in demonstrating that despite its apparent calm the deep stirring and cross currents Goalpara had actually underwent. Hence as a micro-study the book succeeds hugely in its objective.
The work is as much about the relegation of a mainstream territory and its people into a peripheral borderland due to the political vicissitudes of the region as it is about the politics and identity and space. The author succeeds in braiding the two currents successfully and uses the Schendelian concept of ‘borderland’ profitably. However the same cannot be said about the other concepts she brings in course of discussion. Sometime these categories were irrelevant in her work, for example, the use of the concept of Zomia. The author, one gets the impression, was attracted to ‘grand theories’ to be applied to her work even when not necessary. This no doubt demonstrated her topicality and grasp of world currents in social science research, but disrupted her narrative. It made the book dense and heavy and hence difficult reading.
The author will be appreciated for her critical mind. But for a scholar of Sanghamitra’s sharpness it is a difficult to understand how she missed to view ‘wasteland’ and ‘depopulated zones’ as colonial constructions. How is it that most of colonies were found to possess vast wastelands, were depopulated and full of lazy natives? It was also not explained why Goalpara or for that matter Assam had such unending supply of so called wastelands and what were the reasons for its depopulated status. More so, because the whole politics of identity in the region was complicated by the colonial construction of ‘wasteland’ available in Assam and then opening them for incessant migration from the neighbouring Bengal districts. It not only changed the demography of Goalpara but also transformed its cultural character resulting in a new religion-based politics of identity. One also missed a discussion on the emergence of communal politics in Goalpara which has been almost given a miss by the author.
Coming from a prestigious publication house, the printing errors are glaring. The Bibliography misses some book details which were there in the references. The double method of referencing makes it slightly cumbersome to read. Some of the sections of the book lack freshness as these were already published as research articles in academic journals. Despite the academic compulsions a budding scholar confronts, one wished that author resisted the temptation of publication and offered the book entirely fresh. However, these thoughts are generated because it is a worthwhile book. It would delineate its own space in the growing body of north-east literature.