ABSTRACT
Within the alpine terrain of Northeast India, the pristine land institutions responded to the prevailing modes of production. The low level of the productive forces in the alpine terrain did not produce specialised, separable, complex and formal institutions, in which situation, the clan or the chieftainship institutions simultaneously represented social relations within the community and production relations within the economy. This was essentially a non-class arrangement that provided the basis of the institutional epistemology of the communal land system in the hills. The lat-long differences in economic formation in the hills and the valleys in Northeast India shaped the institutional order in respect of land differently in the hills and in the valleys. Therefore, while the Ahoms developed the technique of wet rice cultivation on flat fields, their tribal neighbours practised shifting cultivation (Guha 1991: 63). The powerful clans in Manipur valley captured the wet field economy (Kamei 2009) and in Tripura, the surplus generating wet field cultivation led to the rise of a strong monarchy in the 15th century (Ray 2010: 49), while the tribals in both the states remained tied up with the economy of shifting cultivation in the hills. With lat-long differences in economic formations, Northeast India had blissfully mothered (i) the bi-focal economy in the valley and the hills; (ii) the twin mode of production and (iii) the twin institutional order. The official pedagogy on this critical duality remained thoroughly mis-understood by the state and the policy makers that in due course of time opened up larger theoretical debates. The debates were troubled on the claim of the absolute ownership of the kings over the land. Dun, for example and later on, Das, found the Raja as the absolute proprietor of land in Manipur, (Dun 1980: 59.60; Das 1989: 14), while Roy Burman expressed a dissenting view and contested the Raja’s superior landlordship over the communal land in the hills (Roy Burman 1991: 30–31). He interpreted the overlordship of the kings in the hills as symbolic of political allegiance which did not impair the communal land institutions in the hills.
