ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the contexts and the different moments in which modern infrastructural projects are used to justify imperial agendas. The study underlines the strategies by which access routes extended the physical reach of the colonial state, and the various interactions that ensued along the land routes in the Naga Hills. In turn, the making of ‘modern’ roads came to be closely linked with the emergence of a coercive labour and fiscal regime in the hills. While colonial roads sought to forge new linkages, and allowed mobility of the coercive colonial apparatus, it also put new pressures on the movement and mobility of people and commodities in the frontier. The chapter highlights some of these limits and possibilities as well as the challenges and opportunities, which the imperial road-making endeavours opened for the state and its subjects. There were various ways in which communities reacted to the colonial forms of transport and control over mobility. In the process, the chapter shows how imperial road-building enterprises were mediated and shaped through contestation, negotiation and appropriation by various people and groups in the Naga Hills.
