Spatial Organisation of Northeast India: Colonial Politics,Power Structure and Hills–Plains Relationship

Historical Background

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Ahom Kingdom was afflicted with civil uprisings, court intrigues and intensified raids from the hills. The first Moamaria ³ rebellion broke out in 1769. Without much difficulty, they captured the Ahom capital Rangpur and remained in control for about five months. They were however as easily deposed as they had triumphed. Restoration of Lakshmi Singh, the Ahom king, was ensued by the general massacre of the Morans, the course of action that his successor Gaurinath Singh adopted with even greater horror. The Moamarias rose up again in 1786 and by 1788 Gaurinath was forced to seek shelter in Guwahati. In a desperate attempt to regain his kingdom, Gaurinath sought assistance from the British. Convinced of ‘the gravity of the situation of Assam’, Lord Cornwallis sent an expedition in 1792 under Captain Welsh. ⁴ Welsh duly reinstated Gaurinath on the throne. However, before permanent measures could be adopted to ensure order and check unrests, Sir John Shore, who succeeded Lord Cornwallis, recalled the detachment (despite Welsh’s protest) in pursuance of his policy of non-interference. Having relapsed into ‘confusion, devastation and massacre’, as Welsh had predicted, an opportunity was created for Burmese interference, which, ironically, embroiled the Company into the affairs of the frontier.

Both Kamaleswar Singh and Chandrakanta, the successors of Gaurinath, requested the British for assistance; they were refused. Although they were weak, the energetic Prime Minister Puranananda Buragohain sustained the kingdom by ‘[ceaselessly endeavouring] to bring order out of anarchy and confusion, strengthen the central authority’. ⁵ The attempt on Buragohain’s life was the beginning of the end for the Ahom rule. One of the conspirators, Badanchandra fled to Calcutta and solicited for British intervention; having refused he turned to the Burmese for help. Paradoxically, the Burmese interventions would ultimately bring not only Chandrakanta’s regime but the Ahom kingdom to an end. In 1817 the Burmese armies crossed the Patkai Hills and arrived at Assam. They reinstated Chandrakanta to the throne and returned to their country with a large indemnity. Another court intrigue however called them back in 1819. This time, they stayed back and thanks largely to their ignorance of the might of the British, unnecessary conflicts hastened the First Anglo-Burmese. The war ended in 1826 with the Treaty of Yandabow.

Principles and Practices of Spatial Reorganisation

In the Treaty of Yandabow, the only article pertaining to the Northeast was Article 2, which states:

His Majesty the King of Ava renounces all claims upon, and will abstain from all future interference with, the principality of Assam and its dependencies, and also with the contiguous petty States of Cachar and Jyntia. With regard to Munnipoor it is stipulated, that should Ghumbheer Sing desire to return to that country, he shall be recognized by the King of Ava as Rajah thereof. ⁶

Assam and Manipur greatly suffered from the Burmese occupation; Jaintia and Cachar were threatened with attack, but the timely intervention of the British averted Burmese attack. Unlike Cachar and Jaintia, the Singphos and Khamtis were drawn into the war. In fact, Captain Martin and Lt. Neufville were engaged in operations against the Singphos. ⁷ Besides, many tribal communities suffered in the hands of the pillaging Burmese troops. A Rongmei Naga proverb captures a sense of despair that the Burmese incursion had engendered among the hill peoples:

Awa mei ri pat re tuna kai-su saam-su mak rio.

(Don’t stop building houses and granaries because Awa/Burma war has come.) ⁸

A Tangkhul Naga folksong sings of Meitei girls who having stayed for many years in the Tangkhul country had found lovers. (Many Meiteis took shelter in the hills during the Burmese occupation of the valley). After the war, some left for the valley heartbroken. Some remained with their lovers in the hills.

Free translation:

Brooding Meitei girls,

Recall their stay in the hills with wistfulness;

And pine away for their lovers.

Winnow away the soybean husks in your fields,

Winnow away let’s bow our heads in marriage.

Apparently, the experience of Burmese incursion in its ramifying effects had found into the general imagination of the hill peoples.

It is not incidental that the Treaty of Yandabow mentioned just four ‘valley kingdoms’ and left out the tribal communities who were also affected by the Burmese occupation. This was the way the British viewed and understood the political texture of the region and steered the future of the region. A ‘state’ of independent villages was not in the political register; or, to put it in the context of the Northeast, a state of small communities consisting of independent villages (as it was the general case among the Nagas and the Garos), or groups of villages (Kuki-Lushais), or loose confederacy of villages (Khasis). Such forms of political system did not figure in the idea of the modern state.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British began to consolidate its rule over Northeast India, many European countries were yet to be recognised as sovereign states. It is generally accepted that the Peace of Westphalia (1648) marked the beginning of the system of sovereign states. Such a system was made possible by some phenomenal movements and events that opened the door for kings to assert their independence from the papacy. The religious disruption in the wake of the Reformation, Harold Laski maintained, ‘synchronized with the full realization of national consciousness in Western Europe, and the modern state is clearly visible as a territorial society divided into government and subjects’. ¹⁰ Niccolo Machiavelli gave a forceful and eloquent expression to these two essential components of the modern state—territoriality and ‘the legitimate use of physical force’. His political treatise, The Prince (1532), begins with a statement that reflects the two features: ‘All states and all dominions that have had and continue to have power over men have been, and still are, either republics or principalities’. ¹¹ About half a century later, Jean Bodin developed the idea of absolute authority inherent in the prince in a concept of ‘Soveraigntie’, the term that he introduced into the political vocabulary. ¹² Close to a century after Bodin, Thomas Hobbes grounded the notion of sovereignty on the social contract. For Hobbes, sovereignty was conferred ‘upon one man, or upon one assembly of men’ by the people through ‘the mutual transferring of right’ which he called ‘contract’. ¹³ The foundation of the edifice of the state, according to Hobbes, was the renunciation of the natural and untamed freedom that is characteristic of the state of nature, the condition exemplified by ‘the savage people in many places of America’. ¹⁴ By positioning savage peoples within ‘the state of nature’, Pat Maloney maintained, ‘[Hobbes] precluded their recognition as free sovereign states. He thus contributed a set of premises to natural jurisprudence that denied indigenous societies statehood and excluded them from the family nations’. ¹⁵

These principles underpin Thomas Holdich’s ‘practical consideration’ and suggestions, which he proposed in the Political Frontiers and Boundary Making (1916) for tackling the problems of boundary settlement and demarcation. ¹⁶ Like Hobbes, he drew from the natural law and maintained that territorial expansion was ‘the universal law of nature’. ¹⁷ Holdich went on to say,

The first step forward in the progression of a frontier is an acknowledged interest in some sphere lying beyond it …. When [territorial expansion] occurs in the midst of uncivilised and undeveloped waste of wide spaces under the control of barbarous tribespeople nothing interferes with the expression of that interest which a powerful and advancing nation may take in a weaker (and prospectively useful) neighbour …. ¹⁸

In other words, a powerful nation desirous of expanding its territory to tribal land need not express its intention and if a weaker nation exists beyond the tract, even the weaker nation may be included in its sphere of influence. Simply put, the hills where ‘tribespeople’ inhabited were terra nullius and the system of governance in which the people organised their society was a non-political entity. Of Holdich, it may be mentioned, geographer Kenneth Mason declared that ‘he was the supreme authority on all matters connected with frontier delimitation and demarcation’. ¹⁹

If the legal demarcation of territory, the presence of a sovereign government at the centre and the monopoly of the use of physical force are the essential elements of the modern state, the tribal political setup stood at the opposite end of the spectrum vis-à-vis the modern state. These principles were not merely concepts operating on the terrain of abstract discourses, but they were located in the general complex of concrete relations: They informed the policies of the colonialising empire and underpinned their political decisions.

In the light of this background, first, I want to draw attention to the continuity of this hegemonic discourse and, second, examine some colonial debates and decisions in relation to the claims of the tribes to lands and territories. A detailed discussion is, however, outside the scope of this article. Before the arrival of the British, the hill peoples were, to use James Scott’s term, ‘self-governing peoples’ outside the state machinery. ²⁰ Ambition of a determined king in the plains sometimes climbed the hills and energy of a powerful village in the hills at times boiled down the plains. However, mobility of the hill peoples, fastness and ruggedness of their habitations afforded them an edge over the sedentary plains dwellers. To avert hill peoples raids on the plains, the Ahom instituted an arrangement, a form of appeasement policy, whereby the Nagas were granted revenue free lands called khat and fishing waters called bheel in the plains, the Adis were given the ‘right to all the fish and gold found in the Dihong river’, and such tribes as Bhutias, Akas, Nyishis and Miris were granted posa ²¹ collected annually from the assigned villages in the plains. ²²

The British rule completely altered the power equation. When the hill peoples were deprived of their resources in the plains, raids intensified and when every raid was almost promptly responded with a retaliatory expedition, and the tribes, in their own ways, tried to protect their lands, territories and resources from what they perceived as the sources of threats to their ways of life. It is often said that land and territory are the foundation of the lives of tribal peoples, yet historically the foundation of their existence has been systematically negated, deprived of, and dispossessed.

With respect to the southern boundary of ‘the Eastern Frontier’ of the British India, wrote Captain R. Boileau Pemberton, the confluence of the rivers Jiri and Barak served as the marker of the boundary of Manipur, Cachar and Tripura:

From the source of the Jeeree river along the Western bank to its confluence with the Barak; then South to the Western bank of the latter river to the mouth of the Chikhoo nullah, which, as before mentioned, marks the triple boundary of Muneepoor, Kachar and Tripurah. ²³

Between Manipur and Tripura lies part of the Lushai Hills, which became the present state of Mizoram. In other words, the Lushai hills were a non-political (empty) space. Similarly, an agreement made between the British and Manipur in 1833 reads:

The Governor-General and Supreme Council of Hisdoostan declare as follows: With regards to the two ranges of Hills, the one called the Kalanaga Range, and the other called the Noonjai, which are situated between the eastern bend of the Barak and the Western bend of the western bend of the Barak, we will give up all claim … and we will make these Hills over in possession to the Rajah, and give him the line of the Jeeree and the western bend of the Barak as a boundary. ²⁴

The two ranges of hills, home to some Naga tribes, lie between Manipur and Cachar. The agreement merely mentioned that the raja of Manipur shall allow the hill peoples to trade in the plains of Cachar. Before the colonial intrusion, ‘travelers dared not venture to pass through the country [the hills] except in large bodies, and even then, were compelled to pay largely at every village for permission to continue their journey’. ²⁵ Neither did the British invade nor annex the hills, but they ‘give up all claim’ and ‘make these Hills over in possession to the Rajah’. The language of the agreement speaks for itself.

When in 1831 rumours of Burmese invasion spread around, defence of Sadiya in the upper Assam and Manipur assumed greater urgency. In a meeting in June 1831, Vice-President of the Council Sir Charles Metcalfe proposed to hand over the Sadiya tract to Gambhir Singh, the Rajah of Manipur. ²⁶ Gambhir Singh, having proved his military prowess in the Burmese war, was a worthy choice for the British. Therefore, ‘it was even debated whether it would not be wise policy to ask Manipur to extend its dominion so as to take in all that frontier’. ²⁷ By doing so, the British hoped that the Manipur kingdom would maintain law and order in the hills. In 1838 (?), Captain Gordon, the Political Agent of Manipur, conveyed ‘the intention of [Manipur] Raja to bring the Naga hills permanently under his rule’. ²⁸

From today’s vantage point, it seems preposterous to debate on delegating such a task—even the British took more than half century, incurred much loss and met with frustrations, to effectively take control of the Nagas, Singphos and Khamthis. However, the British continued to maintain that tribal lands per se did not constitute a political territory. Lieutenant-Governor Cecil Beadon in a letter to the Government wrote that ‘[The Angami Nagas] have never enjoyed or acquired political or territorial Independence’. ²⁹ Sounding almost irritated by various correspondences, which mentioned the Angami Nagas as independent, he tried to settle the issue once and for all.

In his report, Pemberton gave a painstaking and meticulous account of the boundaries. The structure of the Report is instructive. Divided into five sections, it covers four kingdoms of the region—Manipur, Assam, Cachar and Jaintia (in this order)—and Khasi Hills. The Khasis must have attracted Pemberton’s attention owing to their daring attack in 1829. Besides, the Garos and the Khasis were the first of the Northeast tribes with which the British came into contact. Most importantly, from a strategical point of view, Khasi hills lie between the Assam Valley and Surma Valley. Importance accorded to these kingdoms, as said, was not incidental; they were to become the administrative centres.

Mackenzie’s comment on the Lushai Expedition of 1871–2 provides an important clue towards understanding the principle of British policy: ‘There is among them no paramount chief or dominant tribe that we could recognize and support, or entrust with the task of consolidating the scattered clans ….’ ³¹ He continued, the British must therefore occupy the land of the Lushais by force, thereby ‘prevent a regime of tribal massacre upon our border ….’ ³² The British policy may be encapsulated in the words of advice that Machiavelli gave to a prince on governing ‘acquired cities or principalities’: The prince should allow the subjugated peoples ‘to live with their own laws, forcing them to pay a tribute and creating an oligarchy there that will keep the state friendly toward you’. ³³ The policy is apparent in the case of the British relations with the hills, since the British physically occupied a few villages leaving the bulk of the hilly tracts nominally administered and ‘unadministered’ throughout their rule. The policy is founded on familiar commonsense such that each act, decision or instruction is tended to be seen as an isolated event prompted by situational demand or a reflection of pragmatism, rather than an expression of a systematic policy. More importantly, its far-reaching effects are easily missed or overlooked. When the British made pact with Tirot Singh (Khasia), Taghi Raja (Aka), Beesa Gam (Singpho), ‘Meyong Abors’, and Sukpilal (Lushai) or when the traditional authorities were strengthened in the hills of Manipur, it is easy to assume that the colonial officers were merely responding to the situations. Far from being a specific instance or a situational response, the British systematically followed the policy towards the hill tribes in particular and the region in general.

In the hills as it was in the plains, the British sought out paramount powers or dominant communities who were in the position to ensure stability in their dominions. S. K. Chaube discerned the situation, but he did not pursue the implications of empowering the valley kingdoms strong enough to maintain order in their domains and control the surrounding hills, but not so strong as to challenge them, a mistake that the British realised much to their woe when the Meiteis revolted in 1891. Chaube observed,

At the time of the advent of British power in India there were, apart from thousands of independent village communities, six major Hinduised states in the eastern region—the Koch, the Tripuri, the Jaintia, the Kachari (where Muslims dominate), the Ahom and the Meithei (Imphal valley). ³⁴

The British strengthened the centres where power could be wielded to control the peripheries. As Holdich said, ‘It is this power of the central control which determines the extent as well as the permanence and strength of a country’. ³⁵ These ‘Hinduised states’ in the plains became the nuclei around which the ‘thousands of independent village communities’ in the hills were to revolve. Or to express in Sanjib Baruah’s words, the hills were to be fenced off as the ‘region … outside the “theatre of capital”’. ³⁶

Differing Worldviews of Boundary System

The British found out that there was no calibrated boundary system, but ‘overlapping sovereignty and territories’. In the context of the hill peoples, Chaube said, ‘until the British advent, the notion of territorial or political authority was unknown in the hills’. ³⁷ The supposedly ideal natural boundary markers such as mountains, watersheds, rivers, watercourses, and foothills seldom delimited their spaces. There are songs and tales of exploit against the plains as well as the hills, but their conquests and spatial domain were never reduced to treaties to be sanctioned by laws. Summarising the boundary concepts and practices in the Southeast Asia, Solomon wrote:

In traditional Southeast Asia, order and surveillance were not easily maintained in remote areas. Sovereignty was not defined in a rigorous territorial sense. Marginal territorial concessions were a legitimate instrument of national policy, and were not viewed as fatal to the kingdom. A shifting frontier, based on transitory power relationships, was a means of gauging and aligning the international equilibrium. ³⁸

‘In one of the most perceptive treatments’, Edward W. Soja commented, on the African conceptualisations of space and territory Paul Bohannan observed that

The African view of terrestrial space tends (there are half a dozen exceptions) to be one based on the regulation of social relationships… There are a few peoples who divide up the world by natural boundaries such as rivers and hills. Most, however, see it in terms of social relations and the juxtaposition of social groups. ³⁹

These two views encapsulate the way the peoples of Northeast India seem to understand and organise their territorial spaces. Foothill, for instance, was not the boundaries between the Ahoms and the surrounding tribes. The West, on the other hand, viewed the space, in the words of Soja, as ‘compartments whose boundaries are “objectively” determined through the mathematical and astronomically based techniques of surveying and cartography’. ⁴⁰

In the colonial system, the boundary system which was characterised by ‘a shifting frontier’ and defined in terms of social relationship was supplanted by fixed and precise boundaries. Even at the village level, or group of villages, ‘British created accredited territorial chiefdom, what was based on kinship shifted to territory’. ⁴¹ The result is the reification of territorial identity of the communities, which have been, thanks to colonial literature and administration, differentiated into discrete ethnic groups. Boundary disputes (between states, ethnic groups, and villages) and irredentist movements, which beset many states, remain some of the persistent legacies of colonial rule.

Discourse of Protectionist Policy

As the British consolidated their rule over the plains, the Western boundary system displaced the local practices. This new order created problems particularly in relations to the hill peoples. Neither did the hill peoples acknowledge the administrative boundaries nor did they quite comprehend the power they were contending with. The Khasias, led by Tirot Singh, Syiem of Nongkhlaw, raised the first major opposition against the British in 1829. Interestingly, the ‘Anglo-Khasi war’ is not mentioned in Shakespear’s ‘prominent examples’ of disastrous and regrettable incidents, which includes, ‘White’s disaster at Sadiya in 1839, Lowther’s in 1858, Holcombe’s at Ninu in 1874, Butler’s at Pangti the following year, Damant’s at Khonoma in 1879, Manipur in 1891, and others’. ⁴² The first incident refers to the Khamtis’ attack on the Sadiya outpost in which the Political Agent Colonel White was killed along with ‘eighty odd men, women and children’. The second refers to the humiliating expedition against the Adis. Not only did expedition incurred the loss of ‘a European and three Native soldiers besides coolies’, but the expeditionary force was compelled to beat a hasty retreat. Except for the Meitei revolt of 1891, the rest relate to the Nagas. The first was the attack on a survey party in 1875 in which Lieutenant Holcombe and eighty other men were killed and Captain Badgeley and fifty men were wounded. In the same year, Captain Butler was speared to death at Pangti, a Lotha Naga village. The most serious one was the murder of Mr. Damant, the Political Officer at Kohima, in 1879 and the subsequent rebellion of many Angami Naga villages against the British occupation of their country. Curiously, Shakespear did not include any encounter with the Lushais in his examples of disastrous incidents. A notable case was the abduction of Mary Winchester, six-year-old daughter of a tea planter in Cachar in 1871, which was responded with the Lushai expedition of 1871–2.

By and large, the British policy towards the hill tribes was conciliatory conceived and implemented in the shade of indifference. However, the unruly hills threatened the stability of the region, thereby posing danger to their lives and the economy. B. C. Allen sounded almost exasperated when he wrote, ‘it was impossible for any civilized power to acquiesce in the perpetual harrying of its border folk’. ⁴³ In the words of Mackenzie, it was ‘a firm and kindly policy of defence and reconciliation’. ⁴⁴ Lord Dalhousie ‘pronounced the Assam Frontier a bore. Our officers were to mind their mouzahs and leave the hillmen alone ….’ ⁴⁵ In other words, the colonial officers were to care for their ‘administrative districts’ or ‘localities’ in the plains and disregard the hill peoples. To keep the hill tribes at bay, the British continued the Ahom policy of the posa system. The entitlement of the Akas was translated into the yearly payment of the sum of ₹360 and the Nyishis fixed at ₹2,543. ⁴⁶ The Adis’ claim for the ‘right to all the fish and gold found in the Dihong river’, unlike posa, was found to be difficult to be settled in terms of monetary payment. ⁴⁷ The Nagas’ claims for khat and bheel was particularly problematic, because in the newly drawn boundaries the lands fell within the British territory. The British were quick to translate posa into monetary payment, for allowing the tribes to collect revenue in their jurisdiction or own lands in their territory undercut their idea of sovereignty.

If the uplanders saw the British as a threat to their ways of life, the plains peoples, at least initially, saw them more like a deliverer than an invader. J. H. Hutton aptly articulated the constrasting attitudes: ‘The British occupation of the Assam Valley was welcomed by its inhabitants but the British were never invited to occupy the hills, and were, on the contrary, strenuously resisted’. ⁴⁸ Hutton could have as easily included the Manipur Valley. The condition of Manipur, on the eve of Burmese occupation, was a scene of intrigues and treacheries among the princes. ⁴⁹ The worst was yet to follow: A local historian Birachandra called the Burmese occupation of Manipur (1819–26) ‘the darkest periods in the History of Manipur’. ⁵⁰ During the period, locally called ‘the Seven Years Devastation’, according to Birachandra, about 550,000 Manipuris were killed during the period and more than 330,000 carried away as captives. The figures seems to be phenomenally exaggerated; if the figures are true, more than 90 per cent of the population was either killed or taken away. The condition of Assam was equally depressing. During the Burmese occupation, more than one-half of the population lost their lives and not less than 30,000 were taken away as slaves. ⁵¹ The dismal tales of famine, pestilence, barbarous treatments, and widespread miseries need not be reiterated here. After the war, the Lower Assam was annexed and as the prospects of economy looked up with the discovery of tea, oil, and coal, the whole valley was brought under the British control. Regarding Manipur, it was made ‘a protected State’. Consequently, the Manipur Levy ⁵² was instituted, paid, and ‘supplied with ammunitions by the British Government’. ⁵³ By 1833, its strength was increased to 3,000 men, which was considerable since the population of the valley was estimated between 30,000 and 40,000. The upkeep of the Manipur Levy was professedly meant to defend against Burmese invasion, but it indirectly served to bring the hill peoples under the Manipur state’s control, ⁵⁴ or, in the words of M. McCulloch, the second Political Agent of Manipur, ‘[Gambhir Singh] was employed in coercing the hill tribes ….’ ⁵⁵ The British established the Raja of the valley the King of the state. ⁵⁶ No wonder, when the issue of the abolition of Manipur Regency came up in 1861 and in 1863, Chandrakirti, the Raja of Manipur, petitioned the Government to retain the Regency on both occasions. ⁵⁷

In the light of this historical context, the introduction of the Inner Line Regulation can be seen as a policy to avert raids, thereby obviating the burden of administrative expansion over the hills. When the Regulation was implemented in 1873, the nature of relationship between the hills and the plains mainly consisted in raids, retaliatory expeditions and limited trade. None of the tribes, except for those in the Garo hills of the present Meghalaya state, had come under British administration. In fact, when Captain Butler, in view of the Angami Nagas’ raids in 1871, ‘offered to assume the direct management of the tribes’, he was instructed ‘to refrain from any attempt to extend direct rule’. ⁵⁸ Mackenzie mentioned two reasons for the implementation of the Regulation: first, to put ‘stringent control [over] the commercial relations’ ⁵⁹ and, second, to delineate the jurisdiction of the British territory. ⁶⁰ The British had reasons to fear that giving free hand to traders could breed troubles. For instance, the Garos were found ‘to make incursions into the plains to avenge themselves on the Choudries for the extortion and oppression suffered at their hands ….’ ⁶¹ Where the British did not rule, they cannot effectively control. The British also tried to hammer home to the hill peoples a sense of recognition and respect for their territory. The agreement with the ‘Meyong Abors’ (Adis) is a case in point. Article 2 reads: ‘The limit of the British Territory which extends to the foot of the hills is recognized by the “Meyong Abors” who hereby engage to respect it’. ⁶²

The ‘kindly policy of defence and reconciliation’ has been interpreted as a manifestation of protectionist attitude towards the hill peoples. It appears to me that the reluctance to expand administration over the hills, not a desire to protect, determined the conciliatory policies. B. C. Allen enunciated the reason:

[For] the annexation of their territory the Nagas are themselves responsible. The cost of the administration of the district is out of proportion to the revenue that is obtained, and we only occupied the hills after a bitter experience extending many years, which clearly showed that annexation was the only way of preventing raids upon our villages. ⁶³

Following the same logic, Lord Dalhousie wrote in a minute, ‘Our possession [of the Naga Hills] could bring no profit to us, and would be as costly to us as it would be unproductive’. ⁶⁴ When the British did expand the administration to some strategic areas in the hills, the logic of justification of the right to rule took a ‘paternal’ guise. Some colonial writers defended the imposition of the Inner Line as a means of shielding the hill peoples from exploitation. And this justification has been assumed as an established fact. Therefore, some scholars saw ‘backwardness’ and ‘waywardness’ of the tribal as a direct consequence of the ‘colonial protectiveness’. ⁶⁵

On the whole, ‘the policy of segregation’ has been identified as the most damaging factor that sowed the seeds of disintegration against an imagined wholeness of the region. ⁶⁶ According to Chaube, pursuance of the segregative policy steered the British to pass such acts as the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 and the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874, and include the provision of ‘Excluded Areas’ and ‘Partially Excluded’ in the Government of India Act of 1935. Sanjib Baruah maintained, ‘The continuation of the British policy that aimed at protection of vulnerable indigenous peoples has led to the successful political integration of dissenting minorities in the north-east’. ⁶⁷ For Divyarchana, the policy ‘made the hill people separatist by attitude’, because it made them ‘feel that they are totally different people from India’. ⁶⁸ Falguni Rajkumar insisted that ‘Many ethnic groups misconstrued the policy as the first step towards achieving provincial or political autonomy and for some, political independence from India’. ⁶⁹ Rajkumar singled out the segregative policy as the point of convergence in which strategic, economic and ethnic concerns of the British were forged into an administrative tool:

Largely contrived to suit its administrative needs for a strategically, economically and ethnically important region, it adopted a policy of convergence, by addressing all the three issues, together. To achieve these objectives, various administrative mechanisms were introduced to segregate the areas occupied by the upland tribal communities by preventing the free entry of non-tribal population and foreigners into these exclusive tribal areas. ⁷⁰

The policy of segregation, as Rajkumar said, has economic and strategic importance—after all, profit and safety were the primary concerns of the British. However, far from empowering the hill peoples, the policy, to partially paraphrase Ursula Bower, ‘cushioned them against the impact of civilization’, which is rather a euphemistic way of saying that the policy screened off the hill peoples from access to education, engagement in modern economy, and development of infrastructures. ⁷¹ For what the hill peoples needed was not so much protection from exploitation as empowerment so that they could negotiate with the changes in their own terms. Therefore, to say that the Inner Line was meant to isolate the tribes from ‘the politics of the plains’ ⁷² sounds as simplistic as to conclude that the divide and rule policy inculcated separatist attitude among the hill peoples, because the reading of the history fails to recognise the magnitude of the asymmetrical development of infrastructure and power relations in the region engendered and fostered by the divide and rule policy. ⁷³

In Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (2005), Baruah invited the readers to think about the political troubles of the Northeast ‘outside the hackneyed paradigm of “insurgency”’ and ‘beyond the developmentalist mind-set’. The book, he claimed, was ‘a step towards rescuing academic and policy discourse from the iron-grip of colonial ideas about castes and tribes; languages and dialects; and hills and plains such as nation-building and development ….’ ⁷⁴ It is questionable, if the policymaking informed by these principles leads to ameliorating changes or condemns the region to a vicious cycle of conflicts. The political engagement that fails to address developmental issues and the political discourse that does not factor in such categories of analysis as ‘castes and tribes, languages and dialects, and hills and plains’ are grievously impoverished for being removed from the lived realities and for slighting the relationship between identity and location (social, political and geographical). For the marginalised communities, to partially quotes Paula M. L. Moya, ‘experience’ and ‘identity’ will ‘continue to be primary organizing principles around which they … mobilize’. ⁷⁵

In other words, the experiences of poverty, of deprivation, and of being labelled Hao (outcastes) and Kacha (inferior) will continue to constitute crucial factors in the mobilisation and construction of identities and such categories as indigeneity, tribe, language, and hills-plains will continue to serve as the frame of reference for the articulation of identities. To engage in academic and policy discourse on the region without taking these categories into account tantamount to depriving the marginalised communities of reference points. It is one thing to say that categories such as ‘castes/tribes, languages/dialects, hills/plains’ have been taken too far as to consider them as though they were things in themselves, but to argue that they should be discarded as theoretical reference points is an entirely different contention. The argument may be put in the form of a question: Can we effectively talk of race without referring to ‘colour’ or of ethnic politics without ethnicity or of gender without sexuality? To quote Linda Martin Alcoff, ‘The reality of identities often comes from the fact that they are visibly marked on the body itself, guiding if not determining the way we perceive and judge others and are perceived and judged by them’. ⁷⁶

Baruah took a post-structuralist viewpoint to argue that the status of ‘places and peoples as under-development’ and the need for developing these places and peoples were discursive constructs generated by ‘developmentalist institutions’. ⁷⁷ It may be asked: Are we to believe that the infrastructural imbalances between the hills and plains districts (as the Ministry of DoNer’s North East Region District Infrastructure Index shows) are a discursive construct and not indicative of reality? A poststructuralist standpoint needs to be clarified here: Discourses did not create the world, but they imbued the world with meanings. To contextualise the idea, discourses did not create the lopsided development, but generated statements and concepts which, in an attempt to explain the inequality, erected decisive links between protectionist policy and separatist attitude. Continuation of the protectionist policy, Baruah asserted, served to politically integrate the ‘dissenting minorities’. Bhanu Pratap Shukla put the argument bluntly, although the onus is shifted on missionaries in his formulation: The Christian missionaries ‘cultivate in [the hill peoples] the thought of a separate nationality and wean them away from the national mainstream by projecting demands for a separate nationhood’. ⁷⁸

The point is not so much a challenge to the soundness of the protectionist argument as an attempt to highlight the politics of silencing and negating other effects of the policy and the omission of power relations in the discourse. Keith Jenkins’s ideas of history is particularly relevant to my argument. Jenkins maintained that histories ‘are subject to a series of uses and abuses … which … generally correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which structure and distribute the meanings of histories along a dominant-marginal spectrum’. ⁷⁹ Drawing from Foucault, he succinctly, if bluntly, put the relation of knowledge and power: ‘[Truth] is dependent on somebody having the power to make it true’, ⁸⁰ for ‘those with the most power distribute and legitimate “knowledge” vis-à-vis interests as best as they can’. ⁸¹ In short, historians are not only ideologically positioned, but the practice of the production and reading histories are inscribed in the power relations in such a way that some historical ‘truths’ or accounts become dominant and others marginal. Edward Said critiqued the power/knowledge relationship in Orientalism (1979) by linking an exponential rise of representations of the Orient after the late eighteenth century to the emergence of Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. ⁸² Said called to mind Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour’s justification of the British occupation of Egypt in 1910: ‘We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it’. ⁸³ To Balfour, the claim of knowledge about Egypt accorded them the right to dominate Egypt.

A similar correlation may be made between the corpus of writings on the Northeast ‘tribes’, which immensely expanded since the beginning of 1960, and the spread of insurgency movements. The discursive exercises seem to be driven not only by the will to understand but also by the intention to discipline, control, and incorporate. In a sense, the insurgency problems provided a ‘condition of possibility’ for the emergence of a hegemonic project that sought to eradicate differences and of discourses that denied ‘the tribal’ the capacity for agency. The logic of the protectionist argument operates on the absence of ‘collective subjectivity’ or a self-conscious awareness of shared political identity. From this logic it does not take a great leap to conclude that insurgents are a bunch of ‘misguided youths’, the phrase that easily sits on the lips of journalists, political analysts, and politicians. Yet this is a crucial strategy: To confer a sense of an autonomous subjectivity on the rebellious ‘tribes’ is to accept their right to the will to self-determination. Thus, the act of pretension became an effective tool to separate the ‘misguided’ few from the rest.

Viewed from this angle, it is clearer to see the importance of the colonial policies towards the hill peoples to the hegemonic discourse. The colonial politics (that regulated the spatial organisation) established the ‘truth’ that there were no hill peoples, just the hills, the frontiers, or the borders. If the hill peoples existed, they inhabited the realms of anthropology and ethnography. Therefore, the hills were referred to as terra nullius (no one’s land) and many agreements were signed or boundaries drawn between political entities without references to the peoples. If Hobbes is considered to have left a lasting imprint on the modern political thought, his views on savage societies needs to be taken seriously. For Hobbes, savage societies cannot constitute sovereign states insofar as the condition of savage anarchy inherently lacks in the will to form political communities.

Conclusion

In an attempt to analyse how history has structured the power relations of the Northeast, instead of asking ‘How does power manifest itself?’ I have asked, following Foucault, ‘How is it exercised?’ ⁸⁴ My argument is simple: It was exercised by validating and upholding the pre-existing power structure. In the case of the hills, validity of the inference seems apparent. The chiefs were invested with the power to collect tax, impose fine and minor punishment, exact force labour, and the right to wear red blanket as a symbol of their new power. With respect to the region as a whole, as Thomas Simpson put it, ‘[the British] policy was to retain the spatial divide they claimed had existed between upland frontiers and settled administered areas [the plains]’. ⁸⁵ The policy is of course not a simple case of upholding the existing practice: It resulted from the process of overdetermination—the ‘conjuncture’ of concerns for profit and security, expeditions and resistances. In other words, the policy of retaining ‘the spatial divide’ took shape through the concatenation of interests (economic interest), concerns (concern for safety), and ideas (the notion of state).

Therefore, the spatial organisation of colonial Northeast followed the hierarchical order in which the nations with an established state structure were privileged over stateless nations, or, to borrow Baruah’s phrases, ‘the state space in the lowlands’ over ‘the non-state space in the hills’. ⁸⁶ The princely states of Manipur and Tripura were strengthened and maintained, whereas the kingdoms of Jaintia, Cachar and Ahom were annexed. Whether annexed to the British Empire or upheld as a dependent state, the kingdoms became the administrative centres and subsequently the commercial capitals and the seats of powers. The persistence of colonial legacies tends to naturalise and legitimise the configuration of power around which the region is structured and the discursive emphasis on the paternalistic line of reasoning has clouded the stamp of indifference and insensitivity that underlay the British policies towards the hills.