Last attempts to reclaim authority by the Hill elites and the making of indigeneity, 1920s–30s

By the 1920s, the chiefs of the Chittagong Hill Tracts had come under tighter control of the government. As previous chapters have shown, the British administrators had imposed extensive measures to reduce the practice of jhumming and to increase land management. Strict regulations had been introduced not only for forests, but also over agricultural use of land in the Tracts. When it came to the chiefs, the local government saw little use for them and contemplated their elimination from Tracts’ governance altogether. As previously demonstrated, by this period chiefs wielded little real authority over the administration of the Tracts and had lost many of their ‘traditional’ powers.