Landscape, Culture, and Belonging
Writing the History of Northeast India

This volume is an important contribution to the new literature on frontier studies and the historiography of Northeast India.

Neeladri Bhattacharya (Edited by), Joy L. K. Pachuau (Edited by)

9781108481298, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 May 2019

338 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.55 kg

This collection of essays is an important contribution to the new literature on frontier studies and the historiography of Northeast India. Moving away from an exclusive dependence on colonial ethnographies, the authors build their arguments on a varied range of sources: from buranjis to revenue records, survey maps to explorers' diaries, and missionary papers to police files. They question the givennes of the categories through which the region is usually described, and contest the stereotypes by which the people of the region are primitivized. They explore the historical processes whereby the region was surveyed, mapped, understood, represented, politically governed, economically refigured, and historically constituted during the colonial period. Though focused on the experience of Northeast India, the volume also raises substantive questions about the idea of the frontier and the border, the primitive and the modern, and the tribal and the settled, the local and the trans-local.

List of figures
Introduction Neeladri Bhattacharya and Joy L. K. Pachuau
Part I. Borders and Beyond: 1. India's spatial history in the Brahmaputra–Meghna river basin David Ludden
2. The Birth of the Ryot: Rethinking the Agrarian in British Assam Bodhisattva Kar
3. Embracing or challenging the 'tribe'? Dilemmas in reproducing obligatory pasts in Meghalaya Duncan McDuie-Ra
Part II. Surveys and Explorations: 4. Picturing a region: a geographical history of British Assam David Vumlallian Zou
5. Geographical exploration and historical investigation: John Peter Wade in Assam Arupjyoti Saikia
Part III. Ethnography, History and the Politics of Representation: 6. Naga: lineages of a term Alban von Stockhausen
7. Representing the Nagas: negotiating national culture and consumption Arkotong Longkumer
Part IV. Law, State and Practices of Governance: 8. Frontier regime and colonial rule Yengkhom Jilangamba
9. The law of emptiness: episodes from Lushai and Chin Hills (1890–98) Anandaroop Sen
10. The colonial state and the 'illegal' arms trade along the North-East frontier of India, 1860s to 1900s Lipokmar Dzüvichu
Part V. Cultural Dialogues: 11. Appropriating the Ao past in the Christian present Lanusangla Tzüdir
12. Why do people convert? Understanding conversions to Christianity in Mizoram Joy L. K. Pachuau
13. From sacred rocks to temples: recasting religion as identity in North-East India John Thomas
Notes on contributors
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM], Sociology [JHB], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Cultural studies [JFC], Asian history [HBJF], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB]