The Long Conquest : Territorialisation, Rebellion and the 'Tribe' in Eastern India, Circa 1760 to 1900

This book is an enquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton-producing Garo in the colonial archive and its savage transformation into imperialism’s quintessential ‘primitive’ in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE. The precolonial political economy of hill cotton produced by the Garos, its unhinging from the exercise of Garo sovereignty and its eventual commodification twined with the deterritorialization of the community as it made way for elephant mehals and reserved forests form the kernel of the book. This history is seen as participating in and mirroring analogous processes of colonization across vast contiguous swathes of India, including Mymensingh, Chittagong, Bhagalpur, the Khasi hills and the Cachar valley. A central theme explored is the long history of Garo rebellions and their rationality, examined in conjunction with contiguous polities such as that of the Khasis; even as the book follows the growing arc of colonial power in eastern and northeastern India as it converted territory and revenue appropriated through conquest, into dominium. The book makes an original contribution to the historiography of the colonial state, the ‘tribe’ and primitivism by making a case for the welded histories of war, ethnogenesis, revenue extraction and anthropological knowledge otherwise often studied as disparate fields of scholarship. It therefore also offers a new interpretation of the history of the colonization of eastern and northeastern India. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers of these regions and of empire and political economy, law and ‘primitivism’, and anthropology and colonial revenue. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Glossary List of Abbreviations Maps Introduction I II Outline of the Chapters Notes Chapter 1: At the Cusp of Conquest: Cotton and Sovereignty The Order of Sovereignty in the Premodern Garo Cotton and Its Political Economy Authority and Trade: The Duars and Their Valleys Notes Chapter 2: Insurgent Hills: The Garo Peasant Rebellions Signs of Violence: The Prelude Signs of Violence: The Rationale The Garo Peasant as Insurgent The ‘Hill’ Garo, Tikri and the Genealogy of the Bhagalpur Plan Notes Chapter 3: Customs of Conquest: Legal Primitivism and British Paramountcy Rebels into ‘Tributary Garos’ Trade as Conquest: The Garos Disarmed Land and Sovereignty: Mulwas, Zamindars and the Order of Property Rule by Analogy: Law, Paramountcy and the Bhagalpur Model Belligerent Militarism and the Fiction of ‘Quasi Sovereignty’ Notes Chapter 4: The Apportionment of Sovereignty: The Duars and Gird Garo Conquering the Duars Insurrections in the Duar Haats Gird Garo and a Receding Garo Sovereignty The Garos as Pagul Panthis Ethnogenesis on the Anvil of Resistance Notes Chapter 5: Becoming ‘Primitive’ under Colonial Modernity The Economic Imperatives of ‘Civilization’: I The Economic Imperatives of ‘Civilization’: II ‘Cotton Roads’, Militarized Haats and Sebundies ‘Improvement’ as Conquest Relapsing into Raids: The Anthropologized ‘Garo’ The Deepening Violence of Conquest Reiterations Notes Epilogue: Perceiving Absence Superimpositions: Property, Territory and Law in the Elephant Mehals The Spectre of Lost Sovereignty Notes Works Cited Bibliography Archival Sources Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London Assam State Archives, Guwahati, Assam National Archives of India, Delhi Online Resources of Columbia University Printed Texts Index