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Land Conflicts Across Frontiers
Land Conflicts Across Frontiers compares Myanmar’s journey with North East India on the critical and contested issue of land. It examines concerns related to land in pre-colonial and colonial history, causes and consequences of land conflicts today, the socioeconomic dynamics attached to land, along with attempted community-based institutional interventions and rural activism. As Myanmar takes its steps towards a democratic future, it becomes critical for the country to be aware of North East India’s experiences, as they could provide valuable lessons of what to ‘implement’ and what to ‘avoid’. Loss of common property resources, non-recognition of customary rights, ambiguous land laws and inadequate attention to people’s grievances have led to a rural landscape which has witnessed livelihood vulnerability, displacement and conflict. The book not only tries to capture cross-border experiences in order to have a better understanding of land alienation, agrarian discontent and peripheral marginalization but also notes recent trends in rural spaces and suggests policy measures.
Armed Forces and Insurgents in Modern Asia
This volume traces the historical roots and evolution of insurgencies and counter-insurgencies in modern Asia. Focusing on armed rebellions and use of armed forces by both Western powers and indigenous states from the nineteenth century till present day, the volume unravels the problematic of change–continuity and addresses key questions on the nature of warfare. The book looks at eight different regions of Asia: US counter-insurgencies in Philippines; the British initiative in Indonesia and independent Indonesia’s counter-insurgency against its domestic populace; post-World War II Malaya; French and US war in Vietnam; British and Indian counter-insurgencies in North-East India between t...
Landscapes and the Law
Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people’s access to nature in forests and hill tracts. This major interdisciplinary study is thus concerned with the social history of legal processes and the making of law, being as relevant today as it was when first published a decade ago. The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims for access to land and resources, and the complex ways in which customary rights are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule. Basing her archival and ...
Commerce, Political Economy and Ecology in Northeast India
Historically, commerce has existed in Assam in different forms. In the late medieval and early modern times, Assam had trading connections with neighbouring areas of Bhutan, Tibet, Bengal and Myanmar (Burma). This book is about the commercial activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in and around Assam. It looks at colonial Assam’s economy, its traders, mercantile communities, riverine trade and transportation and bazaars and examines the use of resources by the colonial regime. The book also explores the unique ecology of the region and the role it played in defining Assam’s place in the global economy. Rich in archival resources, this book fills a major gap in the historiography of Northeast India and will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of Northeast India, colonial history, economic history, trade and commerce, cultural history, Indian history, South Asian history and history in general.
Capital and Ecology
This volume studies the intersection of capital and ecology primarily in one of the most sensitive geographies of the world, the Eastern Himalayan region. It looks at how the region has become a melting ground of neoliberal developmentalism and ecological subjectivities with the penetrating forces of global and state capitalism, economic projects, and complex power relations. The essays in the volume argue that specific focus on energy infrastructure and energy production has pushed technology and capital towards asset building which has had an adverse effect on the environment, labour relations, indigenous knowledge systems, and traditional livelihood practices in the area. They look at ass...
An Endangered History
An Endangered History examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, c. 1798–1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India, and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and Christianity; speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects intermixed with Persian and Bengali idioms; and practise jhum or slash-and-burn agriculture. This book investigates how British administrators from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used European systems of knowledge, such as botany, natural history, gender, enumerative statistics, and anthropology, to construct these indigenous communities and their landscapes. In the process, they connected the region to a dynamic, global map, and classified its peoples through the reifying language of religion, linguistics, race, and nation.
Founding an Empire on India's North-eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840
Moving away from the subcontinental Indian mainland to the varied social ecologies of Sylhet, Cachar, Manipur, Jaintia, and Khasi Hills, this study offers a much-needed reframing of regional histories of South Asia. It explores the unsettled half-century from the 1790s to the 1830s when the British East India Company, in its attempt to control commercial trade routes connecting India, Burma, and China, strove to establish a colonial administration over the north-eastern frontiers. A region where the river courses shifted and cultivated fields turned into lakes in the monsoons, and seasonal changes required highly flexible and varied livelihood strategies, the East India Company stepped into the shoes of the existing Mughal administration with great difficulty. The book explores both the enabling and constraining conditions of climate and ecology to understand the role of daily administration in shaping subject formation. Challenging the conventional understanding of the founding of the colonial state in India, it reconnects histories of space and polities to provide rare insights into the lesser-known formative years of the East India Company rule.
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction engage with questions of networks and interconnection between people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely varied ecologies of south-western China, Myanmar and north-eastern India, with their rugged terrain, high mountains, monsoon-fed rivers and marshy lowlands, is certainly subject to friction. But today, harsh political realities have created hard borders and fractured this trans-Himalayan terrain. However, the closely researched chapters in this book demonstrate that these borders have not prevented an abundance of movements, connections and flows. Mobility has always coexisted with friction here, but this coexistence has been unsettled, giving this space its historical shape and its contemporary dynamism. Introducing the concept of the 'corridor' as an analytical framework, this collection investigates mobility and flows in this unique socio-political landscape.
