Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India (Transition in Northeastern India)

Becoming a Borderland is a fresh look at how power was configure colonial times through spatial strategies. The book writes the spatial history of the western borderlands of northeastern India, focusing on its dramatic transformation within a span of a few decades, from a region with rich historical connections with the surrounding polities of Tibet, Nepal, Bengal and Assam, into a fragmented zone of polities and a colonial borderland. In its interest in issues of spatial analysis which it brings to bear for the first time in the context of northeastern India, the book forms part of an emerging genre of historical writing on borderlands and foregrounds new templates of connected histories that interrogates those moments in post-colonial history writing that routinely study the local or the region as mere 'fragments'. --Book Jacket. This book discusses the politics of space and identity in the borderlands of northeastern India between the early 1800s and the 1930s. Critiquing contemporary post-colonial histories where this region emerges as fragments, this book sees these perspectives as continuing to be entrapped in a civilizational approach to history writing. Beginning in the pre-colonial period where it focuses on the negotiated character of state-formation during the Mughal imperium, the book then enters the space of the colonial where it looks at some of the early interventions of the East India Company. The analysis of markets as transmitters of authority highlights an important argument that the book makes. Peasantization and the introduction of the notion of the sedentary agriculturist as the productive subject also come up for a detailed discussion, along with economic change and property settlements, which are seen as important ways through which the institution of colonial legality got entrenched in the region. Underlining the interface between the political economy and practices of cultural studies, the book also explores the connections between speech, production of counter narratives of historical memory, political culture and economy, with a focus on the cultural production of a borderland identity that was marked by hyphenated existence between proto- 'Bengal' and proto- 'Assam'. Cover Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India Copyright Contents List of Tables List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction: Connected Stories, Disconnected Borders: Writing Histories of Borderlands 1 The Political Economy of State-making in a Pre-colonial ‘Frontier’ 2 Practices of Sovereignty, Practices of the Market and Early Colonialism 3 Colonial Spaces: Land, Law and Migration 4 Framing a Region: Politics of Speech in a Borderland 5 Histories, Memories and Identities 6 Conclusion Glossary Bibliography About the Author Index Sanghamitra Misra. Series Numbering Appears On Jacket. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [207]-229) And Index.