ABSTRACT
In her history of Bastar, Nandini Sundar observed that ‘[c]olonialism’s distinctive contribution was not in integrating these regions into some wider system, but in changing the terms of this integration’.1 In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a similar process began in the late eighteenth century when in 1760, the Kapas Mahal, as the region was known, was informally ceded to the East India Company. The concept of territorialisation is critical for understanding both how the British conceived of the Tracts and the kinds of methods they employed to bring it under their control. In understanding the period of the Company’s informal control of the Tracts, the ground-breaking work by Philip Stern on The Company-State2 is crucial, which suggests that territorialisation was the dominant policy. It defined British expansion in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It underlay the Company’s efforts to impose sovereignty over the region and to exert its ‘right’ to collect tax from its inhabitants, and also to keep a strong military presence there to protect its claims. The expansion of agriculture, along with the introduction of the plough, was a key means by which the Raj sought to tighten its grip over the territory and its people, and was part of this wider thrust. Territorialisation in the Tracts manifested as the spatial, economic, agricultural, as well as political expansion of the Company state in the region. Although raids were not the sole reason for British expansion into the Tracts, their frequency did galvanise British officials to resort to extensive and various drives towards territorialisation. David Ludden’s work on ‘geographical history’ also provides important conceptual insights for understanding territory under Company rule. Ludden argues there are limitations to ‘thinking about geography in the rigidly territorial terms that constitute national systems of spatial order’3 as if ‘Assam is a solid piece of Indian national territory, fixed inside a world of national states’. With its annexation in 1830 by the British colonial state, Ludden argues, Assam obtained its first ‘firm imperial identity as a regional part of South Asian political geography’ and was positioned as the eastern borderland of British imperialism. Ludden contends that geographically based national identities are a political construct and for that reason ‘[h]uman identity everywhere is now attached to national sites, where some people are always native, and others, necessarily foreign’. Despite
this, he argues, ‘virtually everything in social life is constantly on the move, and the mobility of things in social space defines a reality that escapes the epistemology of national geography’. Ludden further argues that the territorialisation of identity is grossly problematic, not only because identity is always shifting with changes in society, and hence is malleable, but because territory itself is also a construct, which has been historically variable and shifting, and did not necessarily embody a particular ‘culture’, ‘people’, or ‘community’. Hence, he writes, ‘[i]t is now impossible to imagine or describe any place, people, culture, or facet of social life without reference to national maps, which lock every place into immobile gridlines of national geography, static and immutable’.4 This book will further Ludden’s argument and attempt to illustrate the Chittagong Hill Tracts beyond the understanding as a fixed and bounded space, despite its annexation as a non-regulated area, but as a multi-dimensional space shaped by society, history and politics, which was gradually reconstructed as a bounded territory during the long period of British rule.
