FROM STATE TO STATELESS AND THEN COMING BACK TO STATE AGAIN: THE CURIOUS CASE OF KOCH BIHAR/COOCH BEHAR/KAMATAPUR

Abstract

The fundamental concern in attempting to understand the state in India or the Indian state can be said to revolve around a shift, a transfer or shifting of the state from the Mughals to the Britishers. Various attempts have been made to understand or examine this shift from Mughal sovereignty and governance to that of British forms. By means of this examination, in fact, attempts have been made to understand fundamentally the very idea of ‘state’ in an Indian or more so in an Asian context. This paper will focus upon the shifting of the state in the Bengal borderland or frontiers and its implications on smaller, native (princely) and peripheral states. In other words, beginning with the bigger, major, fundamental concerns of state in India, I will in this paper eventually delve into the concerns of smaller, minor states, standing in the periphery of Indian territory and in the frontiers of Asian nation-states. In the context of African Tribal societies, Aidon Southal invented a new form of state called the ‘segmentary state’. Burton Stein, while working on the pre-colonial state including the Mughal state, elaborates the concept of ‘segmentary state’ by means of the case examples of the Southern states of Chola and Vijayanagara. Taking the clue from Southal, Stein asserts that the Chola and Vijayanagara regime or these states were not states in terms of real power but, it didn’t stop them from being a state nonetheless- although only nominally. In other words, the concept of ‘segmentary state’ focuses upon states within a state. It aims to understand the nature of state from the perspective of the periphery. The analysis and approach to understand the state from the perspective of the periphery differs fundamentally from the analysis or approach which seeks to understand the state from above or from the mainland. In this paper, I will elaborate this, first by an exploration of the state of Bengal, then, moving towards the periphery through an exploration of the Ahom state and finally, I will solely focus on the case of the Koch Bihar/Cooch Behar/Kamatapur state, which this study considers as a peculiar case from the periphery of the periphery.