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This book is an enquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton-producing Garo in the colonial archive and its savage transformation into imperialism's quintessential 'primitive' in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE.
The precolonial political economy of hill cotton produced by the Garos, its unhinging from the exercise of Garo sovereignty and its eventual commodification twined with the deterritorialization of the community as it made way for elephant mehals and reserved forests form the kernel of the book. This history is seen as participating in and mirroring analogous processes of colonization across vast contiguous swathes of India, including Mymensingh, Chittagong, Bhagalpur, the Khasi hills and the Cachar valley. A central theme explored is the long history of Garo rebellions and their rationality, examined in conjunction with contiguous polities such as that of the Khasis; even as the book follows the growing arc of colonial power in eastern and northeastern India as it converted territory and revenue appropriated through conquest, into dominium.
The book makes an original contribution to the historiography of the colonial state, the 'tribe' and primitivism by making a case for the welded histories of war, ethnogenesis, revenue extraction and anthropological knowledge otherwise often studied as disparate fields of scholarship. It therefore also offers a new interpretation of the history of the colonization of eastern and northeastern India. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers of these regions and of empire and political economy, law and 'primitivism', and anthropology and colonial revenue.
List of contents
Introduction 1. At the cusp of Company rule: Garo Cotton and Sovereignty 2. The Figure of the Insurgent: the Garo Peasant Rebel 3. The Customs of Conquest: Legal Primitivism and British Paramountcy 4. The Apportionment of Sovereignty: The Duars and Gird Garo 5. Becoming 'Primitive' under Colonial Modernity. Epilogue: Perceiving Absence
About the author
Sanghamitra Misra is Professor of Modern Indian History at the Department of History, University of Delhi, India. She researches the intersecting dimensions of economic and legal history in the context of conquest, colonization, 'primitivism' and resistance. She has authored
Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India (Routledge, 2011) and several articles in academic journals.
Summary
This book is an inquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton producing Garo in the colonial archive and its savage transformation into imperialism’s quintessential ‘primitive’ in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE.
