Becoming a Borderland

The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India

Sanghamitra Misra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136197215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book discusses the politics of space and identity in the borderlands of northeastern India between the early 1800s and the 1930s. Critiquing contemporary post-colonial histories where this region emerges as fragments, this book sees these perspectives as continuing to be entrapped in a civilizational approach to history writing. Beginning in the pre-colonial period where it focuses on the negotiated character of state-formation during the Mughal imperium, the book then enters the space of the colonial where it looks at some of the early interventions of the East India Company. The analysis of markets as transmitters of authority highlights an important argument that the book makes. Peasantization and the introduction of the notion of the sedentary agriculturist as the productive subject also come up for a detailed discussion, along with economic change and property settlements, which are seen as important ways through which the institution of colonial legality got entrenched in the region.

Underlining the interface between the political economy and practices of cultural studies, the book also explores the connections between speech, production of counter narratives of historical memory, political culture and economy, with a focus on the cultural production of a borderland identity that was marked by hyphenated existence between proto- 'Bengal' and proto- 'Assam'.

1

The Political Economy of State-making in a Pre-colonial ‘Frontier’

Goalpara, along with Cooch Behar, and the later colonial districts of Dinajpur, Rangpur and Jalpaiguri, was part of the medieval Koch kingdom which at its height in the sixteenth century encompassed large parts of western Assam and northern Bengal. The fragmentation of the Koch kingdom was followed by about two centuries of Mughal rule. The Mughals failed to establish effective control, particularly over the eastern portions of the annexed territory but the western portion, including Goalpara, remained at least under nominal Mughal rule until its occupation by the East India company in 1765 (Barman 1994: 2). As in several other parts of India, in this region too, the decline of the Mughal state in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the fragmentation of its eastern acquisitions were accompanied by the emergence of several petty principalities.¹

This chapter looks at the negotiated character of state formation during the Mughal imperium in this part of eastern and northeastern India. It emphasises the critical ties that these processes shared with the environment, evident in the strategic use made by the local chiefs and peasant groups of the varied terrain of the region — the dense tropical forests, the alluvial plains of the Karatoya, Manas and the Godadhor, and the Garo Hills — in their several sometimes coherent and sometimes more fragmented struggles against the Mughal state. In its analyses of the effects of the state on patterns of mobility and sedenterisation, the chapter gestures towards the emergence of conceptual realms among communities based on shared ethnicities and territoriality as also their potential inclusion into wider networks of trade and other connectivities. It therefore anticipates an encounter between colonial and indigenous forms of space and power, to be underscored powerfully with the entry of the Company Raj and the colonial state, which is the theme of the next chapter.

The Political and Ecological Landscape of a Frontier Place

The accounts of Francis Buchanan Hamilton, who visited Goalpara in the early decades of the nineteenth century, dates the earliest Mughal invasions of the region to around 1603 or ‘to two years after the death of Akbar’.² Buchanan comments on the ‘desire of encroachment that induced the Moslems, in the reign of Aurangzeb, to invade Assam, the limits of which were then very narrow’.³ The annexation of Assam would have meant an expansion of the Mughal territories beyond the river Manas but was resisted by the Ahom army.⁴ The resultant battles between the Ahoms, the dynasty that ruled over large parts of eastern Brahmaputra valley, and the Mughal army have been chronicled by several writers, including the anonymous chronicler of the Padshah Buranji (Bhuyan 1947).⁵

A significant source for the period under study and presumably written between 1719 and 1731 in the Ahom court, the Padshah Buranji details the long and indecisive struggle by Mughal commanders including Jai Singh, Ram Singh and Mir Jumla for the control of the Ahom kingdom. The battle between Jai Singh and the Rajas of Cooch Behar, who had asserted their independence from the Mughals, is the subject of the seventh chapter, which also has references to the role of the king of Cooch Behar in the conflict (ibid.: 119). The text tells the story in much detail, of the frequent forced retreats of the Mughals, and the signing of the final treaty, whereby the Mughals agreed to maintain the ruler of Cooch Behar, a border state lying to the west of the river Sonkosh, as a tributary.

Mughal political interest in the Koch kingdom and in the kingdom of Assam that bordered it, has been explained by scholars as, ‘the very essence of the existence’ of empires and kingdoms, ‘which saw themselves as continually expanding to become universal empires’ (Embree 1977: 258). Within this theory of the pattern of expansion, the ‘frontier’ would have emerged as a temporary halt, ‘the vanguard of a forward-moving culture’ and excluded from the permanent pattern of Mughal administrative control. Thus, ‘from the beginning of Mughal power in India under Babar in 1526 to its furthest expansion under Aurangzeb it was always an empire of expansion … in fact, expansion eastward to Bengal and southward to the Deccan kingdoms was an irresistible challenge for an ambitious ruler’ (ibid.: 263).

This expansive imperium was not characterised necessarily by shifting and permeable physical boundaries, where the ‘frontier was never regarded as a fixed limit’, marking instead ‘the outer limits of Mughal administrative control which could expand and contract, depending upon the abilities and resources of a ruler at a particular time’ (ibid.: 262).⁶ Rather, the experience of the Mughal and Koch kingdoms indicate the existence of political territories that were defined with precision rather than fluidity. For the Mughals, the boundaries were often natural markers such as rivers (the Manas as the boundary between Ahom and Mughal territory) and chowkis or outposts such as the one at Rangpur.⁷ The Upper Brahmaputra Valley and the Nawab of Bengal’s territory formed the surrounding perennial or nuclear areas with the hills of the Bhutan kingdom to the north, the Sonkosh to the west and the Manas to the east forming the boundaries around. For the Koch kingdom, there are references to the demarcation of the boundaries of the empire by the Koch kings. Ralph Fitch, a merchant from London who visited the court of the Koch king, Maharaja Naranarayan, in the middle of the sixteenth century and offered details about the life of the people of Cooch Behar alluded to ‘the sharp pointed cones’ which although were more likely to be used for defence, also served the purpose of marking the boundaries of the Koch Empire (Ryley 1899: 112).⁸

Fixed political boundaries however were not always conterminous (a corollary of the nature of political power) with the limits of political power. Rather, the nature of political power could lend itself to considerable ‘imprecision’, its sociology dependent on the relationships of reciprocity and fealty between people, not merely on a rigid definition of territorial boundaries. The region in the pre-colonial period, had ‘in a real sense … no political frontiers at all with the Power of one ruler gradually fading into the distance and merging imperceptibly with the ascending Power of a neighbouring sovereign’ (Anderson 1990: 41).⁹ The complex negotiations over power between the Mughal state and local chiefs, underscored in the methods of revenue and tribute collection, makes this more apparent.

Available sources such as the Baharastan-I-Gayabi,¹⁰ and Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Padshah Namah¹¹ suggest that Mughal imperial authority viewed Rangamati (of which Goalpara was a part) as the military and political frontier of their territories in Bengal and excluded this border area from regular imperial patterns of administrative control and revenue administration. For the Mughal state, this would have established a relationship which allowed the chieftains to pay only a nominal tribute while assuring them a degree of autonomy in return for providing a measure of frontier defence at minimal expense to the Mughal treasury. That the region had a difficult geographical terrain and environmental conditions further justified this arrangement. The Baharastan-I-Gayabi records in great detail the several rebellions by local chieftains, Koch cultivators and Mughal officials who had been appointed to regulate revenue administration in the area. These details are interspersed with accounts of the difficulties of military expeditions in the forested tracts of a frontier region. The inclusion of hilly, forested areas such as the Garo Hills within the jurisdiction of the Rangamati thana implied that ‘officers of police and of justice (had) little influence … especially considering the difficulty with which the forests and thickets of reeds had to be penetrated’.¹²

This discomfort of the Mughal imperium with what was obviously an unfamiliar geographical and political landscape, contrasted with the settled villages of parts of neighbouring eastern Bengal and their emerging systems of governance, found a strong resonance in the colonial descriptions of Mughal rule in the region. William Hunter noted that one of the duties of the Muhammadan military officials in charge of Rangamati and Goalpara was to encourage the growth of jungle and reeds as a protection against the inroads of the Assamese (Hunter 1887: 113). Writing about the ‘frontier zamindars’ of Goalpara of the Mughal period, the then political agent, David Scott, described them as ‘lords of the marches’,¹³ ‘indolent, incapable and devoid of any principles’, characteristics that he attributed to the ‘legacy of the Mughal state [during the rule of which] both petty revolutions or plans for usurpation were common’.¹⁴ His criticism of this ‘legacy’ led him to warn that ‘rights exercised freely and abusively by the Mughal agents in Goalpara could not be grafted upon the Company’s system of the Government, which denied such powers rigidly even to its confidential servants’.¹⁵ The Duar region and northeastern Bengal in early colonial ethnographies is described as being a region, ‘the petty chiefs of which would have continued entirely uninterrupted in cutting each other’s throats and in reducing the country to a desert, were it not for the Company’s gigantic power which put a stop to all petty attacks,’¹⁶ an obvious anxiety to underline the effectiveness and paternalism of the state that had replaced Mughal rule in this ‘unstable frontier polity’ being visible here.

The colonial archives acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, the presence of a more complex and diverse set of strategies of state formation in the region. And accounts of peasant rebellions and complex pre-Mughal land tenure systems in Persian documents are powerful corroborative evidence of these formations, as the next section of this chapter will argue. The pre-colonial period emerges from these sources as being equally about the encounter of the Mughal state with local strategies of state formation that included regional chiefdoms, clan chieftaincies and their kinship ties, and their accompanying notions of power. Mughal state–making then also becomes a study in local hierarchies and interdependencies, a base for the larger connected histories that are explored in the next chapter.¹⁷

When the region of Goalpara, Cooch Behar and parts of the Duars was brought under the expanding Mughal empire through a series of military expeditions, several local Rajas, chieftains and nobles, conceded defeat and accepted ranks of subservience. The Rajas of Bijni and Sidli were two such significant local powers: ‘both the Rajas had been subject to the Mughals, who could not possibly have passed into Assam and back without subjecting them’.¹⁸ The Raja of Bijni, in particular, claimed that his family had long been territorial chieftains or Rajas in these parts and had once held all the territory from the middle of Rangpur to the middle of Kamrup.¹⁹ A petition from the Raja to the East India Company in the last decades of the eithteenth century stated that while ‘in the course of time we lost all, except the land now in our possession, and had to seek the protection of the Mughal Government, but on coming under their jurisdiction, we had to pay not rent but a tribute of elephants for the lands of Habraghat, Khauntaghat and Bijnee’.²⁰ Although in later times, the Bijni Raja’s claim to being a ‘privileged tributary’ was to be questioned by the colonial state which categorised his estate as an ‘ordinary zamindari’ estate, there was a recognition that ‘under the Nawab Nazim of Dacca the ancestors of the petitioner’s family had held Bijnee for many years before the Company assumed the Moffusil administration of Bengal in 1765’.²¹ Both the Rajas were rendered tributaries and ‘mal and fauzdarry was levied in the usual manner’.²² The zamindar of the Karaibari estate, similarly, was a small chieftain of the region bordering the Garo hills whose acceptance of Mughal suzerainty established a political relationship which allowed for the payment of a tribute in elephants to the Mughal state rather than revenue from the land.

The rest of Goalpara’s zamindars were part of a local gentry who were recognised as zamindars by Mughal sanads and gradually appropriated hereditary rights in land to emerge as powerful lords by the early decades of the eighteenth century. After the annexation of Goalpara to the Company’s territories in the latter part of the century, officials noted that ‘the several states on the northeast frontier of the Bengal province have never undergone a regular survey, nor have the internal resources been the subject of official scrutiny during the Mughal government; some of them were made subject to the provision of elephants with which this particular tract was abounded; the internal management of all was left almost entirely to the hereditary chiefs found in possession of the estates, who were thus treated rather as tributaries than subjects’.²³

A few of them, like the zamindar of Gauripur, had their origins as ‘primarily tax gatherers, rather than as a taxpayer (and were) … paid for their services through the nankar or allowance’ (Habib 1999: 217). However, unlike the rest of Mughal India, the zamindars of the region of eastern Bengal, including Goalpara, had the land revenue fixed for long, unspecified periods and taken in fixed amounts which gave it the appearance of a tribute rather than that of rent. The earliest of the imperial sanads was probably issued by the Emperor Jahangir in 1606 to Kabindra Patra, who is identified as the ancestor of the Gauripur zamindar by the colonial ethnographer, Francis Buchanan, and by officials of the Gauripur estate. Documents from the estate elucidate the greatness of Kabindra Patra, who rose from the position of a qanungo under the Mughal state.²⁴ The zamindar of the neighbouring Mechpara estate was a choudhari who occupied a crucial position in revenue administration and also received a nankar for his services to the Mughal state. Buchanan Hamilton identifies him as a local chieftain who paid a nominal share of the revenue of Mechpara estate to the Mughal faujdar at Rangamati.

The relations between the Mughal state and the local powers were however not marked by vulnerability and submission alone. Instead, these relations were rendered more complex, most significantly by the tactical use made by local chiefs and Rajas of the unfamiliarity of the Mughals with the local environmental and physical terrain. Many of the alliances that were made had as an important component, the implicit acknowledgment by the state of the critical importance of local knowledge. To begin with, this was apparent in the nature of negotiated political obligations and rights that termed the Rajas of Bijni, Sidli and Karaibari as peshkashi zamindars, separate and distinct from the other zamindars. This categorisation gave them considerable military power and autonomy in issues connected to the political and administrative affairs of their estates apart from being a confirmation of their traditional titles by the emperor. Peishkashi zamindars of the Bijni and Sidli estates also exercised a substantial degree of judicial authority under both the Mughal state and later, during the rule of the East India Company.²⁵ The following note in some early colonial correspondence on the problems of governance in the zamindari tracts of Goalpara and Garo Hills highlights these ‘very ambiguous boundaries of the dif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Connected Stories, Disconnected Borders: Writing Histories of Borderlands
• 1 The Political Economy of State-making in a Pre-colonial ‘Frontier’
• 2 Practices of Sovereignty, Practices of the Market and Early Colonialism
• 3 Colonial Spaces: Land, Law and Migration
• 4 Framing a Region: Politics of Speech in a Borderland
• 5 Histories, Memories and Identities
• 6 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index