IN 1826, an unanticipated consequence of the British military success over Burma was the annexation of the Ahom kingdom of Assam to the Presidency of Bengal. This seemed to have ended the political vicissitudes of the last decade, when late-Ahom debility had rendered Assam a battleground for tussling South and Southeast Asian forces – ‘barkandazi’ mercenaries from Eastern India, Shan levies from Upper Burma, and ‘Moamoria’ insurgents from Upper Assam.
The entry of the English East India Company into this situation changed the balance of power, which had so far favoured the Burmese and Shan troops acting under the pretext of assisting the Ahom with their internal troubles. This Konbaung expansionism had proved most disturbing for the Company, since it held out the strong possibility that entrenchment in Assam could further Burmese designs on Bengal. Hence, in 1824, British troops were dispatched towards what proved to be the beginning of the First Anglo-Burmese War. Two years later, the treaty of Yandaboo established a British victory and the king of Burma, Ba-gyi-daw, renounced all claims upon, and promised to abstain from all future interference with, the principality of Assam and its dependencies.
The few British encounters with Assam were, so far, less than enthusiastic, describing it as a ‘profitless... primeval jungle’.1 Obtained as the by-product of an unplanned war, Assam’s precise place in the evolving imperial system would have to await the discovery of what its ‘wilderness’ could offer. Certainly, in the initial years, the territorial acquisitions deemed advisable to extract from Burma appeared, nonetheless, to be ‘of little value to either state’.2 Such negative perceptions about Assam’s potential stemmed partly from a ringside view of its political turmoil, where internal strife had been considerably worsened by the depredations of the ‘brother kings’ of Burma, and the resultant economic chaos where thousands of refugees had fled to Bengal. But mostly, these doubts were premised upon the nature of the partially monetized, subsistence-peasant economy of Assam and its relative lack of urbanization and commercialization. Rather than the nucleated village pattern of South Asia with its specialized cultivating and artisanal groups, the Brahmaputra valley was characterized by small hamlets clustered along the river banks, interspersed with urban settlements such as Gauhati and Sibsagar, the largest possessing only a few thousand inhabitants. This was indeed a far cry from the great cities of Lucknow or Calcutta, or the thriving qasbahs of North India which had suited the Company’s affairs so well.
In the 18th century, Bengal trade with Assam had certainly flourished for both Indian and European traders, with salt as the major export in exchange for imports of muga silk, mustard seeds, ivory, gold and slaves from Assam. But the limited extent of this external trade meant that the Ahom kings could, and did, prohibit the admission of foreign traders when they felt threatened by the politics upon their borders. Such commercial disruption was perfectly viable given the nature of the local economy where it was the intra-regional exchange relationships, and the ones with Assam’s eastern neighbours which were far more vibrant and essential. Cotton, forest products, oranges, rock salt and iron from the hills were bartered for rice, dried fish, silk and cotton cloth from the valley at markets and fairs held periodically in the foothills.
Similar patterns of exchange prevailed through the caravan routes linking the Assam hills with Bhutan, Manipur, Tibet and Yunnan. Despite a total river mileage of over three thousand miles for the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, turbulent currents limited the river’s navigation potential, which was a major reason for the relative paucity of commercial and administrative links with the mainland of South Asia. ‘At present the ordinary time taken by a country boat of 1000 maunds’ burden from Calcutta to Dibrugarh is as great as that of a voyage round the Cape to London by a sailing vessel,’ wrote Captain Vetch in 1853.3
It is illuminating, therefore, to see how in its early years, any promise that the new British acquisition of Assam seemed to possess was only as a contact point for western expansion into Southeast and East Asia. In the 1830s, the American Baptists missionaries who had worked in the Karen territory until their banishment by the Burmese state were offered Assam in its stead, as a likely field ripe for ‘civilizing’. East India Company officials advised the Americans to commence their efforts at Sadiya, the extreme tip of Upper Assam, ‘the northernmost point of territory inhabited by the great Shan family’, farthest away from the Indian hinterland.
A sympathetic Evangelist official, Charles Trevelyan, conjured up the strategic prospects in store for this Assam ‘Shan’ mission. ‘From this point an impression may be made upon Burmah... The communication is open with Yunnan, the westernmost province of China, and it is the intention of the Indian government to send out a mission there by this route, next cold season, for the purpose of enquiry about the culture of the tea plant. On the other side, Bhutan, and Thibet, and more countries and people than we have any accurate knowledge of at present, are open to the messengers of the Gospel; and lastly, the Shan language, which is near kin to the Burmese and Siamese, and belongs to the Chinese family, furnishes a ready means of intercourse with perhaps a greater number of people than any other language in the world, except Chinese itself’.4 These seekers of souls were being encouraged to see Assam as the staging post for expansion beyond the Indian subcontinent, just as a number of Company officials were doing.
Initially, it had seemed that the British would keep Lower Assam, the territory immediately adjoining Bengal for themselves, while entrusting the wilder reaches towards the east into suitably docile native hands. Assam’s first British administrator, David Scott, had indeed set in motion the restoration of an Ahom prince, Purandar Singha, over Upper Assam territories, upon payment of a tribute. However, this measure was vehemently opposed by his successor, Major Francis Jenkins, who succeeded in 1836 in ousting the prince and bringing his lands directly under British rule.
Jenkins’ action was momentous indeed, particularly in light of the commodity capitalist structures that colonialism was about to introduce into Assam. While the original conquest of Assam can certainly be understood in terms of P.J. Marshall’s theory that East India Company expansion usually occurred in a piecemeal and haphazard manner, driven on by short-term opportunism of the men on the spot, the future character of British rule would be determined by the newly discovered prospects for Assam’s economy
There were two landmark events in the 1830s, which help to contextualize Purandar Singha’s dethronement a little better than Jenkins’ specious pronouncement of his ‘misgovernment’. One was the Charter Act of 1833, offering land ownership in India to Europeans, and therefore allowing Jenkins’ to lay out his scheme for Assam’s future on the lines of ‘colonization’. Hence, his statement that ‘the settlement of Englishmen of capital on its wastes of these frontiers seems... to offer a better prospect for the speedy realisation of improvements than any measures that could be adopted in the present ignorant and demoralised state of native inhabitants’.5
The second event was the scientific authentication of a wild plant growing in Upper Assam as a close relative of the Chinese tea plant. What this reveals is how Purandar Singha and other local chiefs were ousted to enable the Assam Company’s ‘conversion of uninhabited jungles to a smiling cultivation’,6 only the first step in the dislocation and upheaval caused by constructing a Planter’s Raj in a sparsely populated, subsistence economy. As in other parts of the ‘tropics’, the 19th century opening up of this region was based on extensive movements of capital, goods and people. British imperialism mostly determined from which direction these would arrive as Assam was redrawn as the political frontier upon India’s ‘Northeast’, away from its historical positioning at the cultural and ecological crossroads of South and Southeast Asia.
In 1872, the first census report on Assam described it as ‘a cul-de-sac... a long valley, say, of some 400 miles, hemmed in on either side and at one end by mountain barriers which are well nigh impassable and having a mighty river running through it. The authority of the British government makes itself felt in this region over an area of perhaps 30,000 square miles and a population including a host of savage tribes in a low stage of civilisation of 1,500,000 which gives 50 souls to the square mile, while the revenue may be put down at about Rs 100 to the square mile’.7
Almost half a century after the treaty of Yandaboo, British India’s Northeast frontier lands had considerably grown, expanding from the Ahom and Matak territories in Upper Assam into the previously unknown hilly tracts to its east and south. By the end of the 19th century, additional territories inhabited by the Lhota, Angami, Ao and Lushai were being incorporated through a series of ‘pacifying’ expeditions. Assam’s neighbours, Tibet and China, were also providing significant determinants of an expanding policy along this frontier.
It needs to be kept in mind that a large portion of the British contempt for the Ahom kings was premised upon their opinion that the Assam valley was ‘surrounded north, east and south by numerous, savage and warlike tribes’, but ‘the decaying authority of the Assam dynasty had failed of late years to control (them) and whom the disturbed condition of the province had incited to encroachment’.8 But this colonial view betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of local authority and identity structures of the pre-colonial period. In contrast to the British premium upon ‘control’ and ‘encroachment’ in relation to fixed landed parameters, the Kachari, Koch and Ahom states had practised a much looser pattern of exchange systems and interactions with the hill groups such as the Naga who lived alongside them. These were complex and long-standing relationships between the hills and plains of Assam, and even beyond, with Shan and other groups, which ran the gamut of barter, trade, gift and tribute ties.
As the anthropologist Edmund Leach has suggested, human beings not separated by major geographical barriers are most likely to have relations with each other, and ‘so far as these relations are ordered and not wholly haphazard there is implicit in them a social structure. We have to view cultural differences as likely to be structurally different but not as necessarily indicating that the differing groups belonged to distinct social systems’.9 But most British administrators of Assam regarded the notion of a social structure as being inherent in such relations in a singularly sceptical mode. Instead, they would identify its components, for example, the posa payments by plains villagers as akin to ‘the Chouth of the Mahrattas and blackmail of the ancient Highlanders’.10 This conflation of the Assam hill groups within a historical typology of ‘marauders’ constructed for them was its necessary riposte as a policy of segregation and containment. What these officials viewed as the ‘indefinite nature of the connection subsisting between the Assam sovereigns and their savage neighbours’11 now provided a rationale for colonial measures promoting a strict boundary between the plains and the hills.
Such a policy of spatial segregation was shored up ideologically by the ethnographic imagining of non-western people that was simultaneously underway. By the late 19th century, seizing upon and magnifying differences among different categories among colonial subjects, an exhaustive list of the ‘tribes’ of India was in preparation. This was part of the processes by which British colonialism ordered and separated groups into tribes and castes within a discursive framework built around ideas about savages and primitives, and about hunting, pastoralism, agriculture and commerce. Societies were ranked in relation to each other, situated above all in relation to time, or more specifically, in relation to the modern time epitomized by Europe. The specific time that societies occupied, the question of how ‘advanced’ they were, was measured by various criteria, ranging from technology, habitat, modes of subsistence, climatic variations or racial types.
The ‘heterogenous’ ethnic situation in Assam provided an array of additions to this species of ethnographic classification, as the region’s peoples could now be categorized into a continuum ranging all the way from the ‘civilized’ caste-Hindu to the ‘savage’ head-hunter. The Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 has to be seen in this larger context, in terms of creating a new internal frontier for British India. It allowed the colonial state to create an Inner Line along the Assam foothill tracts, whereby the inhabitants of the tracts beyond would ‘manage their own affairs with only such interference on the part of the frontier officers in their political capacity as may be considered advisable with the view to establishing a personal influence for good among the chiefs and the tribes’.12 This regulation was added to by the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874 and the Frontier Tract Regulation Act of 1880 which permitted the exclusion of the territories under their purview from the codes of civil and criminal procedures, the rules on property legislation and transfer and any other laws considered unsuitable for them.
Ostensibly framed to control ‘the commercial relations of our own subjects with the frontier tribes’, such measures instituted what Sanjib Baruah calls the move from ‘soft to hard boundaries’, the creation of excluded areas where no British subject or foreign citizen could venture without permission.13 By the early 20th century, once the hills were deemed as safely ‘pacified’, the characterization of the inhabitants of its hills shifted somewhat, with an official ideology of ‘noble savage’ modifying the earlier image of ungovernability. A paternalistic regime reigned in these ‘excluded districts’ where the administration possessed a tremendous range of discretionary powers in order to preserve and protect the timeless systems that colonial ethnography was discovering for these ‘hill tribes’. A piquant situation emerged whereby the Assam plains began to be regarded as an extension of a larger Indic schema, while the hills were constructed as an externality, given their kinship to the Southeast Asian peripheries beyond.
Over the colonial period, the cultural impact of the assimilation of the Assam plains into British India was that connections with the Indic world began to outstrip any other. While Assam had, through the centuries, served as an intersection between the Indic and Sinic worlds to its west and east, the colonial annexation brought the former centrally to the forefront. This is not to gainsay an earlier repertoire of Sanskritized cultural and political ingredients that had made its way into the Brahmaputra valley, but only to recognize its cohabitation and partial overlapping with other patterns. Despite their adoption of Sanskritic motifs, the pre-colonial Ahom rulers of Assam had never quite lost sight of the cultural motifs they traced to a legendary Tai homeland in Southeast Asia. The depiction of the Swargadeo as a descendant of Indra emphasized their identification with this Southeast Asian node, coexisting with the kinship claimed with the ‘Nara kings’ of the Shan lands.
In the early 19th century, the reduction of the Ahom kings by combined levies of Shan, Singpho and Burmese troops and their carrying away of thousands of captives can actually be viewed as a late eruption in a long history of population movements in this part of the world. It was with some such notion that colonial ethnography built up its theories of race movements of tribes such as the Bodo into Assam, from unspecified Chinese territory. By the late 19th century, there were frequent assertions by caste Assamese Hindu, Muslim and Sikh groups of migration from Indic homelands in Kanauj, Gaur (Bengal) and elsewhere. Such origin myths among these plains elites point to a sense of identity which was beginning to be based upon a desire for Indic ritual status and territorial affiliation. Orientalist theories of a racial differentiation between ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ could now be deployed to imagine a rigid boundary between ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ populations, with the former seen as high-status migrants from ‘Aryavarta’, residing amongst ‘Mongoloid’ races.
After South Asia achieved independence from the British, the cumulative effect of events such as the Partition of 1947 or the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 was to further delink Assam’s plains and hills, politically, culturally and economically from their neighbours. India’s ‘decolonization’ of the last half-century did not manage to sufficiently reverse the British tendency to treat this region as a distant frontier, valued primarily in strategic or extractive terms. Internal political restructuring of the region into smaller political units has certainly created opportunities for local elites and some amount of decentralized policymaking, but lasting structural change has been slow and difficult to achieve in the face of actual and metaphoric distance from ‘Delhi’.
It remains to be seen if a new ‘Look East’ policy, through re-establishing the connections severed in the past, will be able to redress and rectify the anomie created for ‘India’s Northeast’ by these cleavages, initiated by British imperialism and then perpetuated by the new nation-states in Asia.
Footnotes:
1. John MacCosh, Topography of Assam, London, 1837, p. 2.
2. H.H. Wilson, The History of British India from 1805 to 1835, London, 1858; Reprint 1997, p. 111.
3. A.J. Moffat Mills, Report on the Province of Assam, Calcutta, 1854; Reprint Guwahati, 1982; Appendix C, Captain Vetch’s letter of 22 June 1853, p. 71.
4. H.K. Barpujari ed., The American Missionaries and Northeast India: 1836-1900, A Documentary Study, Guwahati, 1986, p. 4.
5. Foreign Political Consultations, No. 90, 11 February 1835, Letter from Francis Jenkins to Swinton, 22 July 1833, NAI.
6. Mills, Report, Appendix E, Petition to the Governor-General of India from the Directors of the Assam Company, p. 80.
7. H.N. Beverley, Report on the Census of Bengal, Calcutta, 1872, p. 45.
8. Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the Northeast Frontier of Bengal, Calcutta, 1884, p. 7.
9. Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, London, 1954; Reprint, London, 2001, p. 17.
10. Mills, Report, Letter No. 3 of 1844 from Captain J.T. Gordon to Major Jenkins, p. 169.
11. Ibid.
12. A. Mackenzie, History of the Relations, pp. 89-90.
13. Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, Pennsylvania, 1999, p.31.
