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

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.

Neeladri Bhattacharya is Professor of Modern Indian History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was Agatha Harrison Fellow of St Anthony's College, University of Oxford and Visiting Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesberg, in 2001.
Joy L. K. Pachuau is Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, in 2001. Her research interests include European expansion in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, history of Christianity in India and Asia, sociocultural history of Northeast India, and visual anthropology.